Grievance Software for Canadian Education

Education labour relations runs on the school year. Grievance timelines interact with reporting dates, term breaks, and summer recess, and decisions made at the start of a school year often do not generate disputes until weeks or months later — when the affected member is back in front of a class. Any software that ignores the academic calendar misses how the work actually flows.

The bulk of the caseload tends to cluster around seniority and transfer rights, class-size and workload grievances, preparation time and supervision duties, sabbatical and academic freedom concerns, and disputes over supply and occasional teacher assignments. In post-secondary, the picture adds tenure, academic rank, and workload formulas that can run to their own appendix in a collective agreement. And because agreements in the sector routinely exceed 200 pages, finding the relevant article quickly is not optional — it is the core problem.

Sertus is built by the co-author of Canadian Labour Arbitration(Brown & Beatty) — the reference text Canadian arbitrators cite — so the platform understands the structural reality of education collective agreements and the arbitration practice that interprets them. Grievance types map to the categories arbitrators actually recognise, and deadline tracking reflects the step timelines written into the agreement itself.

The K-12 and post-secondary regimes look alike from a distance and operate very differently up close. In K-12, the bargaining structure has been shaped by provincial frameworks that coordinate central and local bargaining between school boards and teachers’ federations. Ontario's system — with OSSTF, ETFO, OECTA, and AEFO representing different teacher populations and a two-table bargaining structure — is a distinctive example, but most provinces run some variation on the same theme. The resulting agreements tend to be long, detailed, and specific about class-size targets, preparation-time minimums, supervision duties, and transfer procedures. Grievances on any of those clauses can affect dozens of teachers at once, and the remedy frequently applies across a whole school or board.

Post-secondary adds another set of structural features. Faculty associations bargain at the institution level, with agreements covering tenure procedures, academic rank, workload formulas, sabbaticals, research time, and academic freedom. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and its provincial affiliates coordinate across faculty associations, but each association bargains its own agreement. Colleges and CEGEPs bargain under separate regimes again, often through sector-wide structures. Sertus treats each bargaining unit as a first-class object so an institution with a faculty agreement, a support-staff agreement, and a contract academic staff agreement can see grievance volume and resolution rates broken out by unit — the numbers that tell a labour relations team where the pressure is and where the next bargaining demand is likely to come from.

Canadian education labour relations is shaped by a familiar set of sector unions and bargaining structures. The following are examples of bargaining units and sector organisations Sertus can support — not a claim that any of these organisations are Sertus customers. In Ontario, the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF), the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario (ETFO), the Ontario English Catholic Teachers’ Association (OECTA), and CUPE school board locals cover the K-12 workforce. In British Columbia, the BC Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) represents public school teachers; in Alberta, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA); in Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF); in Nova Scotia, the Nova Scotia Teachers Union (NSTU) and the Nova Scotia Government and General Employees Union (NSGEU) cover different parts of the system. In post-secondary, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) and the many provincial faculty associations under its umbrella represent academic staff at Canadian universities. Sertus is designed to handle grievances under the kinds of collective agreements these organisations negotiate — whether you are on the employer side at a school board, college, or university, or on the union side representing members under one of these agreements.