Premier Brian Pallister says his government wants to ensure the best quality of education in the early years, and the Smaller Class Size Initiative, better known as 20 K-3, was not the way to do that.
    
Earlier this month, the province replaced the program with the new Early Years Education Initiative, which will provide greater flexibility, and also match previous funding.
    
As a former teacher, Pallister says it's not just the number of students in a classroom that matters, it's the components.  "It's the real truth that in our classrooms there's great diversity, great differences in need. So the make-up of the classroom, the nature of the number of students that are in there is one part, but the more important part is the needs of the students."

Pallister said they want to make sure the local school divisions and teachers have greater flexibility in how they manage their classroom situation.  Pallister said 20 K-3 is a program that's demonstrated not to have worked, pointing out that in the last number of years, Manitoba's educational outcomes were 10th out of 10 provinces.

Pallister said his government wants to ensure our education system serves our students first and foremost.  "These arbitrary rules really make it hard on local school divisions and frankly they jack up the taxes local people have to pay for education, without demonstrating any really real results for that extra cost to Manitobans."