The architecture of responsibility in systems that harm

When a system produces predictable, patterned harm — exclusion, restraint, academic abandonment, institutional gaslighting, attrition framed as “choice,” disability-based discrimination — that harm arises from the structural design of the system itself, because structures generate outcomes with the same reliability that rivers carve their beds, and structures reveal the priorities of the province long before a single teacher meets a single child. The entire public education system rests on provincial decisions, provincial budgets, provincial regulations, and provincial definitions of what counts as inclusion, and those decisions shape every district’s capacity long in advance of any classroom interaction.

So when Minister Lisa Beare says:

“We all wanna keep kids safe in classrooms, this is why we at the ministry have provided record levels of funding for districts, including Surrey. Year over year, they get over a billion dollars in funding this year, along, we expect districts to staff their classrooms accordingly,” Global news Oct 28

she performs a familiar manoeuvre that shifts responsibility downward, framing exclusion as a localised failure that belongs to one district’s budgeting choices or one school’s staffing decisions, even though every structural lever that shapes those decisions belongs to the province.

Power protects itself by disowning the consequences of its own architecture.
Hierarchical systems distribute blame downward and concentrate authority upward.

The province makes the budgets.
The province sets the funding formulas.
The province writes the School Act.
The province controls the staffing ratios.
The province authorises the urgency triage categories.
The province governs the Teacher Regulation Branch, which adjudicates misconduct through opaque timelines.
The province decides whether children are entitled to a full day of education.

And yet somehow the province claims that when a child is excluded — pushed to half days, suspended by attrition, left at home because the classroom cannot accommodate their distress — the province has nothing to do with it.

The province creates the conditions of harm, but when harm appears, they insist the blame lies elsewhere.

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Individuals cannot redeem the institution

People often insist that there are “so many good people in the system,” and of course this is true — many educators care deeply and try with sincerity to support children. Yet goodness, within a structure that renders harm inevitable, becomes a fragile buffer rather than an antidote. The presence of good people does not alter the design of the system; instead, their empathy becomes the sponge that absorbs systemic failure.

Good people inside a violent system become:

exhausted shock absorbers
individual containers for collective failure
evidence deployed to claim the system works

Their goodness becomes a narrative device.
It becomes a justification: “Look, the system cannot be failing — look at these committed educators.”

But individual virtue cannot repair structural cruelty.
Individual empathy cannot overcome systemic starvation.
Individual teachers cannot alter provincial ratios.
Resistance inside an institution cannot erase the institution’s design.

In a system built to ration support, even the kindest educator participates in the machinery because scarcity shapes every option available to them.

Guilt, responsibility, and accountability

Three concepts matter here: guilt, responsibility, and accountability. They are distinct, and understanding their distinctions clarifies the provincial role in exclusion.

1. Guilt

Guilt belongs to individuals who make individual decisions:
a principal who refuses an IEP meeting;
a teacher who weaponises behaviour charts;
a district administrator who signs off on an illegal exclusion.

Guilt is personal, discrete, and traceable.

2. Responsibility

Responsibility belongs to systems that design the conditions within which individuals act:
the Ministry of Education;
the provincial government;
the cabinet;
the Superintendent of Inclusion;
the architects who decided acceptable staffing ratios;
the decision-makers who created designation categories that function as rationing tools.

Responsibility does not erase individual guilt, but responsibility sets the stage upon which every harmful act becomes possible.

3. Accountability

Accountability is the obligation — individual and institutional — to correct harm, to resource adequately, to regulate ethically, and to acknowledge the truth of what occurred. It becomes meaningful only when the most powerful actors carry the greatest burden.

Yet in British Columbia, accountability inverts:
those with power deny responsibility, and those without power — families, teachers, principals, EAs — absorb blame.

This inversion is structural.
This inversion is deliberate.
This inversion is a choice.

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Why the “good people” argument is so seductive

The system benefits when individuals are praised for their goodness, because then the system can claim that harm is not systemic — that it is a failure of one classroom or one administrator, not a province-wide architecture that guarantees failure.

The “good people” narrative functions in three ways:

1. It distracts from structural analysis.
   If teachers are good, then the system must be good.
   If the system is good, then the harm must be a misunderstanding.
2. It pacifies dissent.
   Parents feel guilty for criticising a system staffed by good people.
   They internalise blame or minimise their children’s suffering.
3. It isolates moral courage.
   Individual educators who speak out are treated as anomalies rather than evidence of a broader crisis.

Goodness is irrelevant to responsibility.
Good people in broken systems still reproduce harm because the system shapes their options, their training, their caseloads, their fears, and the stories they are allowed to tell. Intentions are such as small aspect of impact!

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Why the “bad seed” argument is so convenient

The system benefits when harm is attributed to a single individual, because then the system can claim that exclusion is an aberration — a rare lapse in judgment by one teacher or one EA — rather than the predictable outcome of a provincial architecture built to ration support and triage children.

The “bad seed” narrative functions in three ways:

1. It collapses systemic harm into personal failure.
   If the problem is one negligent staff member, then the system remains intact.
   If the system remains intact, then no structural change is required.
2. It diverts accountability away from the province.
   Parents are told the incident was “handled internally,” as though the conditions that produced it were incidental.
   Oversight bodies investigate individuals while leaving the province’s funding and staffing decisions untouched.
3. It obscures patterns of exclusion.
   Each event is reframed as unique, preventing the public from recognising that these incidents emerge from the same shortages, the same classroom pressures, the same unmet needs.

The identity of the seed never explains the nature of the soil.
A system that treats harm as individual misconduct avoids reckoning with how its design — its ratios, its budgets, its policies, its silence — ensures the same crises reappear, no matter who occupies the classroom.

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Why the province’s deflection is morally unserious

When the Minister says exclusion is a district problem, she is making a category error: she is treating outcomes as though they are isolated, even though the inputs are provincial.

Districts do not choose the funding model.
Districts do not set the salary grid.
Districts do not control designation categories.
Districts do not define the inclusion mandate.
Districts do not decide whether it is legal to send a child home.

The province controls these.
And so the province is accountable.

A system is responsible for the harm that emerges from its design, even if individual actors believe themselves to be doing their best.

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Why the Ombudsperson data creates the illusion of isolated harm

We have just read the New Westminster report to the Ombudperson, offers the first glimpse into what the provincial investigation will likely produce across all districts. Its pages contain meticulously itemised records — half-day removals, brief suspensions, in-school exclusions, and “adjusted schedules.” The detail is clinical: numbers, dates, codes, confirmations that work was uploaded to Teams.

Such detail creates an optical illusion:
the illusion that exclusion is traceable, finite, manageable, and numerically small.

A list of two-day suspensions implies a minor problem.
A series of partial days framed as “gradual entry” implies supportive planning.
A small catalogue of Code-of-Conduct breaches suggests typical behavioural management.

But this dataset counts only the exclusions the system chooses to name.

The report reveals the mechanisms of invisibility:

There is no MyEd code for Section 104 exclusion.
These exclusions are entered as “absent” or “authorised,” indistinguishable from ordinary absences.

These absences will remain unlinked even after the planned updates.
The exclusion vanishes inside the database.

The report contains no data on burnout absences, trauma-driven refusal, parent-protective withdrawals, or crisis removals.
These are among the most common forms of exclusion.

There is no information on movement from public to private schools by designation.
Children who disappear from the public system vanish from the dataset.

There is no analysis of absenteeism by designation.
Absence is one of the strongest indicators of exclusion.

The district answered the questions it was asked.
The problem lies in the structure of the inquiry.
The Ombudsperson’s framework measures only the harm the system already records, which means the majority of harm remains outside the frame.

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How incomplete data produces the ‘few bad apples’ narrative

By restricting the inquiry to officially coded events, the investigation unintentionally reinforces the “bad seed” narrative: if only ~120 exclusions appear in the data, then surely the problem lies with those few incidents, those few decisions, those few classrooms.

But the absence of data is not evidence of the absence of harm.

The absence of data is evidence of a system designed not to record harm in the first place.

The investigation thus risks becoming a bureaucratic cleansing ritual:
the district discloses a finite number of exclusions, the public sees a manageable dataset, and the province declares the issue localised, containable, and amenable to minor procedural reforms.

The real crisis remains unmeasured.

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Why the new “adjusted schedule” form could be read as pre-emptive containment

In November 2024, just weeks before the Ombudsperson’s investigation formally began, district personnel were instructed to use a new Record of Adjusted Schedule form — a document that reframes shortened days and partial attendance as planned, supportive interventions rather than as exclusions. The timing is instructive.

Bureaucracies move slowly when harm is reported but rapidly when oversight is coming, and this form appeared at the precise moment when pressure from families, advocates, and journalists made it clear that an external investigation was inevitable. Rather than confronting the realities of illegal removals, parent-coerced half-days, and the widespread use of attendance as behavioural leverage, the system produced a document that sanitises the practice: a bi-weekly review, a team-based decision, a parent signature, and the narrative of “well-being.” It is a familiar manoeuvre — the rapid formalisation of an already-entrenched exclusionary practice so that, when the Ombudsperson arrives, the system can point to procedure rather than to harm.

This form narrows what counts as exclusion. It captures only those removals the district is prepared to acknowledge, while leaving untouched the vast and unmeasured landscape of burnout absences, protective withdrawal, crisis-driven part-days, safety removals, “please keep them home today” phone calls, and the slow attrition that pushes families toward private schools or home instruction. By formalising one sliver of this pattern, the district can claim transparency while ensuring that the majority of exclusion remains unrecorded. The polished clarity of the form creates the illusion of order, yet many exclusion-related absences are coded simply as “absent,” indistinguishable from illness, travel, or disengagement. A system that erases the data cannot pretend the problem is small.

And this is precisely how pre-emptive containment works. Instead of addressing the architecture that produces exclusion — chronic underfunding, impossible staffing ratios, and the quiet normalisation of part-time attendance for disabled children — the system creates a paper trail that converts exclusion into “support,” converts coercion into “collaboration,” and converts structural harm into “team-based planning.” The form makes the exclusion seem limited, manageable, and contained. Just a few bad seeds and the caring educators trying to help.

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What the province must release to show the true scale of exclusion

If the Ministry of Education wishes to make honest claims about the scope of exclusion in BC, it must release the datasets it already holds:

• Absences by designation, disaggregated by grade, district, and year
• Chronic absenteeism correlated with IEP status, disability designation, and behaviour categories
• Movement from public to private schools by designation
• Movement out of the school system entirely
• Part-time attendance patterns across districts
• Burnout-related or conflict-related withdrawal from school
• Section 11 appeals province-wide by designation
• Urgent Intervention Process data
• Wellness Centre and community-program attendance for excluded students
• WorkSafeBC-related restrictions causing exclusion

These data points exist. Many are collected and held centrally. Some are exchanged between districts and the Ministry weekly.

Without them, the Ombudsperson’s dataset is not a portrait of exclusion.
It is a portrait of the provinces’s preferred version of exclusion — the version small enough to deny systemic responsibility.

A system that produces predictable harm belongs to the government that designed it, funded it, and legislated it, and neither the goodness nor the failures of individuals absolves the province of its responsibility to redress and repair the harm.