Asynchronous distance
3 of 5You hold the clock. The school still holds the program.
Changes one meter: the credential. The other fifteen are the same everywhere, because they describe an arrangement rather than a statute.
Load against capacity
Who decides
0 school · 100 familyThese do not move when your household changes. They are set by the arrangement itself.
What becomes possible
0 closed · 100 openWhat it costs
Longer bar · heavier on youThese bars run the other way. A long bar here is not a win. It is unpaid work that has moved into the house.
The numbers are editorial estimates, set to be consistent with each other rather than measured from a survey. What they are for is the shape: which bars move together, and which arrangement moves a cost from one column to the other. Any single figure is arguable. The pairing of control and load is not.
The job you actually take
From where the child sits
What is on the table
Five things, and who holds each one
Most arguments about schooling are actually arguments about one of these five. Naming which one is usually enough to end the argument.
If it goes wrong
Falling behind
Every arrangement has a mechanism that notices a problem, and the mechanisms are not equally fast. A school notices in weeks because attendance and marks are counted by someone whose job it is to count them. A household directing its own program has no such counter, which is the cost of not being surveilled.
The fourth dimension
Who controls the credential
The first three questions this page asks all have answers that move. Who controls the learning, who controls the time, who controls the assessment: slide a dial and they slide with it. The fourth question behaves differently. It barely moves when you change the arrangement, and it only moves at all when you change the jurisdiction.
Whether a child’s demonstrated Grade 12 knowledge converts into a recognised provincial credit is decided by an institution in all five arrangements and all thirteen jurisdictions. What varies is only how narrow the opening is.
Credential control · Saskatchewan · Home education
Enrolment only
The route in Saskatchewan
The Saskatchewan case
It is worth walking one jurisdiction all the way through, because Saskatchewan is the only one in the set that moved recently, and it moved in a direction that is easy to describe wrongly.
Until September 2025 the route ran like this. Learn the Grade 12 material at home, at your own pace, in your own order. Challenge the provincial departmental examination in that subject. The exam sets the mark. The mark becomes a 30-level credit on an official Saskatchewan secondary transcript. No enrolment anywhere at any point.
The Province wound down the Grade 12 provincial examination program at the end of August 2025, and its own material acknowledged what that did: home-based learners had been able to challenge those examinations to earn 30-level credits, and after the change that option no longer exists. The stated reason was equity. Only about a quarter of Grade 12 students wrote a provincial exam in 2023-24, and only in some subjects.
What replaced the route is enrolment. Adult and home-based learners are directed to take Grade 12 courses through the Saskatchewan Distance Learning Centre or a post-secondary institution. That is not the same shape of thing. Sask DLC offers no stand-alone exam challenge, requires the 10-level and 20-level courses before a student can enrol at the 30 level, and requires completion of the course material and attendance to be eligible to write the final. A one-afternoon conversion became a multi-year enrolment.
The province-wide assessment program announced alongside the change does not close the gap, and was never built to. The Saskatchewan Student Assessment covers mathematics in Grades 5 and 9 and English language arts in Grades 4, 7 and 10, with field testing from 2025-26. It does not reach Grade 12 at all, and it is an achievement measure rather than a credit-bearing examination. Home-based learners may take part in it. Nothing they do in it becomes a credit.
So the accurate statement is narrow and worth being exact about. Saskatchewan did not restrict home education. It kept the right to homeschool and the parent’s authority to choose and direct the program entirely intact, and removed the principal mechanism by which independently demonstrated learning converted into provincial credit. Educational autonomy was preserved. Credential autonomy was not. They were never the same thing, and since August 2025 it is much harder to mistake one for the other.
The comparison is the part that took work to establish. Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario all keep a conversion route open to home-educated students. Alberta’s course challenge is the documented main way a home education student earns credits. British Columbia’s challenge and equivalency policy explicitly names students registered as home schoolers, not only enrolled ones. Ontario grants equivalency credits on transfer from home schooling and allows a capped challenge process. Saskatchewan had a route of that kind and no longer does, which puts it at the restrictive end of the country rather than the middle of it.
Sources for the Saskatchewan case: SHBE on the elimination of departmental exams · SHBE, planning for post-secondary · paNOW, 4 April 2025 · CKOM on the replacement assessment program. The credential numbers are editorial and comparative, set so the thirteen jurisdictions can be ranked against each other. The classifications, the dates and the mechanisms are sourced.
The route that exists everywhere
The parallel credential
Every jurisdiction has a second door, and it is the same door: an adult equivalency credential rather than the school diploma. The Canadian Adult Education Credential replaced the GED across Canada in May 2024. It is five examinations, in mathematics, reading, writing, social studies and science, and passing all five produces a high school equivalency.
Two things about it matter for a family reading this page. It is age-gated, normally at eighteen, though New Brunswick will consider home-schooled applicants at seventeen and Newfoundland and Labrador allows an exemption at eighteen given a six-month gap from the graduating year. And it is a different document from the provincial diploma, accepted in many places but not all of them.
Universities generally have their own door as well. Saskatchewan’s two universities will take a parent-issued transcript alongside an SAT or ACT for most programs, and polytechnics commonly use a placement test such as the Accuplacer for applicants who did not attend high school. Every one of those is a route around the provincial credential rather than into it, granted at some other institution’s discretion. That is the difference the credential meter is measuring.
Registering in Saskatchewan
What it actually involves
Filing requirements vary more across the country than anything else on this page, and they vary in a direction that surprises people. The jurisdiction with the lightest paperwork is not the one with the most generous credential route, and the one with the heaviest filing is not the most restrictive about what you may teach.
The trade
Control and load are the same lever
The five arrangements are not a ladder from worst to best. They are five different distributions of the same fixed quantity of work. Nothing in the set removes the work. Each one only decides whether a salaried adult does it or an unpaid one does, and which decisions come attached.
Which is why the capacity dial matters more than the arrangement dial. Two households can pick the same arrangement and be running two entirely different situations, and the thing that separates them is not commitment. It is hours and money.
Elsewhere