Mr. Griffiths: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was driving into the city the other day, and I saw a Strathcona county school bus with a big sign on the back advertising Elk Island school division. I've seen other school divisions advertising on billboards and TV. To the Minister of Education: given the need for accountability why in these tight fiscal times are school boards spending precious educa­tion dollars on advertising rather than on students and programs?

Mr. Hancock: Well, it's a good question, Mr. Speaker. Locally elected school boards do have autonomy over their funds and get to direct them. They are restricted to 4 to 6 per cent on administrative funding, which is where advertising would come from. Spending on advertising comes out of that process, but it's within their budgetary discretion. It's a good question, though. All last fall we talked with school boards about whether the funds that we're using in the education system are helping us to achieve our outcomes and looking to say: can we cut back in areas where we're not achieving our outcomes? That being said, the school boards do get funded on a per capita basis, so they try to attract more students.

Mr. Griffiths: They try to attract more students. To the same minister, then: given that they're trying to attract students through advertising, have any of them done a business case in their business plans to show that spending money on advertising attracts enough students to offset the cost of the advertising and improves the students' education?

Mr. Hancock: Well, Mr. Speaker, I wouldn't be privy to that information. That's within the purview of the school board. We try not to collect more information from school boards and put them through more reporting processes than they absolutely have to do, so I don't have that kind of information. However, we do have a system of choice. Again, school boards do compete for students, unfortunately — that's part of the system — so they do engage their advertising dollars, but they have to be accountable to their elector­ate for the way they spend their dollars.

Mr. Griffiths: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. To the same minister: given that social media, the Internet, word of mouth, and great programs for students are the best ways to advertise and are free or improve education, will the minister begin discussions with the school boards to talk about curbing this policy so all dollars go to actually educating students?

Mr. Hancock: Mr. Speaker, that's precisely the kind of discussion we engaged in last year and we're going to continue to have. The resources that we have are substantial, but they're never going to be enough to do everything that people want to do, so we have to focus on making sure that as we use the public's resources, we're achiev­ing the outcomes in the system that we want to achieve. We need every school board, we need everybody involved in the system, we need every teacher in the school to look at every dollar that's being deployed to determine whether we're getting the best value for the money. So that discussion will continue, the value review that says: are we achieving outcomes with the investment we're making, and is what we're doing adding value? Every school board should be doing that, the provincial government should be doing that, and every school should be doing that.