A test score tells you how students did on an exam. It says almost nothing about whether your child would feel safe, engaged, or cared for at the school in your neighbourhood. The AEAM is the part of the picture that asks the people actually in the building — parents, students, and teachers — what the experience is like. We surface it on a school profile precisely because it measures something the numbers usually miss, and we treat it as one input among several, not the last word.
What "AEAM" actually is
It's an annual survey run by the Government of Alberta. The name has changed a few times, so you'll see it under several labels in older reports:
| When | Name | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| Before 2020 | Accountability Pillar Survey | The original name |
| 2020/21–2024/25 | Alberta Education Assurance (AEA) survey | Renamed under the new "Assurance" framework |
| 2025/26 onward | Alberta Education and Childcare Assurance (AECA) survey | Rebranded when Education merged with Childcare |
Same survey, same questions, same results table — just a new sticker each time. When you see a colour-coded grid of school "measures," that's the Alberta Education Assurance Measures (AEAM) table. For a Calgary public school, the per-school version lives in a PDF called the SIRR (School Improvement Results Report) that each school publishes.
What it measures
Six measures come from the survey itself. Each one blends the answers of teachers, parents, and students into a single percentage — the share who agree with statements about the school:
| Measure | Plain-language meaning |
|---|---|
| Student Learning Engagement | Are students interested and invested in their learning? |
| Citizenship | Do students follow the rules, help each other, and respect one another? |
| Education Quality | Are families satisfied with the overall quality of teaching and education? |
| Welcoming, Caring, Respectful & Safe (WCRSLE) | Do students feel they belong and are safe at school? |
| Access to Supports & Services | Can students easily get help when they need it? |
| Parental Involvement | Do parents and teachers feel parents have a real say? |
The same table also carries achievement rows — high-school completion, diploma-exam results, and PAT results. At an elementary school the high-school and diploma rows show as "n/a" because those programs don't exist at that level; the survey measures above are the part of the table that describes the school's day-to-day experience. That's normal, not a gap in the school.
How to read it
A few habits make these numbers far more useful — and protect you from over-reading them:
- Lead with the 3-year average, not this year's number. The table reports both. At a small school, a single year can swing several points when only a handful of parents respond, so the 3-year average is the steadier signal and the current year is a directional check.
- A measure near or above the Alberta benchmark is "doing fine." The table prints the provincial number right beside the school's, so you're comparing to a real baseline, not a vibe.
- Read the safety/belonging measure (WCRSLE) as a broad signal, not a diagnosis. It rolls up roughly seven to nine questions — belonging, fairness, route safety, "do other students treat you well." A middling score tells you something feels off, but not what; that's a question for the principal, not a verdict from a spreadsheet.
- Treat one weak measure as a conversation-starter. A school strong on engagement but soft on access-to-supports is telling you exactly what to ask about on a tour.
"Not surveyed" is not a low score
This is the single most important thing to get right. Coverage is uneven:
- Results are hidden when too few people respond. If fewer than six people in a group
(parents, say) answer at a given school, that cell is suppressed for privacy and shows as a
*. Suppressed is not zero — it means "not enough responses to report." - Not every group is surveyed at every school every cycle. At an elementary, only the older students (roughly Grade 4 and up) are surveyed at all, and a small school may simply not clear the reporting threshold for parents.
When a school has no AEAM data, FamilyRoost shows it as pending (PND) — never as a low score. A blank is a blank. We say so rather than penalizing a school for a thin survey year.
Why the survey complements test scores
Single-number school rankings lean heavily on test results, and test results track neighbourhood income more than they track teaching — a school's Fraser or PAT standing often reflects the families it enrolls as much as the classroom itself. The survey is a useful counterweight: a school can post middling test numbers and still have students who feel safe, parents who feel heard, and staff who feel supported — or the reverse. That's signal a test can't carry, which is exactly why it sits alongside the other sources in our Roost Rating rather than being folded into a test number.
The honest caveats
We'd rather you see the limits than trust the number blindly:
- Who answers isn't a random sample. Engaged, school-positive, English-fluent parents respond at higher rates. Alberta mails surveys with prepaid envelopes and translates the parent survey into 11 languages to widen the net, but a community with many newcomer families can under-report dissatisfaction simply because dissatisfied families respond less.
- Teachers rate their own school higher. Across Calgary's public board in 2024–25, teachers rated the safe-and-caring measure at 89.0% while students rated it 74.5% — a 14.5-point gap. Because the headline measure blends all three groups, staff optimism nudges it upward.
- The rolled-up number hides disagreement. A happy staff and a worried parent body can average out to a forgettable "middling" — fine for comparing schools on the same yardstick, but a reason not to read one decimal place as truth.
- The 2020/21 pilot year doesn't count. It wasn't evaluated against provincial standards, so any trend that includes it is suspect.
- There's a built-in lag. Today's published table reflects a survey run the previous spring, and the 3-year average reaches back further still — so it can trail a recent leadership change or a shift in the neighbourhood by a year or more.
This page explains what the survey is and how to read it. A specific school's measures come from the live dataset and show their own data-freshness date on the school profile, with a link back to this page.