Saskatchewan Homeschool Testing Requirements: What's Mandatory and What's Optional

The short answer: Saskatchewan home-based education families are not required to have their children take standardized tests. The longer answer explains what you do have to submit instead, what testing options exist if you want to use them, and where families get tripped up by what their school division tells them versus what the provincial Regulations actually say.

What the 2015 Regulations Require

The Home-Based Education Program Regulations, 2015 govern annual assessment for Saskatchewan home-based education families. The Regulations require families to submit an Annual Progress Report to their school division at the end of each school year. This report must describe the educational progress made in each core subject area during the year.

The Regulations do not specify that this progress report must take the form of a standardized test, a formal evaluation, or a score compared against any provincial benchmark. A portfolio of work samples, a written narrative describing what the child studied and what progress was made, or a combination of both meets the regulatory standard. The measure is whether reasonable educational progress occurred — not whether it can be quantified on a test instrument.

This is meaningfully different from several other provinces. British Columbia, for example, requires registered homeschool families to have a certified teacher evaluate their child annually. Ontario requires a quarterly progress report filed with the district. Saskatchewan's Annual Progress Report is a parent-authored document describing progress; no certified evaluator is required.

What Divisions Must Make Available (But Cannot Require)

Here is where the Regulations draw a specific line: school divisions are required to make standardized tests available to home-based education families who request them. They are not permitted to require families to use those tests as their annual assessment.

In practical terms, this means:

• If you want your child to take the Canadian Achievement Test (CAT) or a similar standardized instrument as part of your annual progress documentation, your school division must facilitate access to that test.
• If you don't want your child to take a standardized test, you have no obligation to use one. Your Annual Progress Report stands on its own as the required documentation.

This provision is sometimes misread in both directions. Some families assume testing is mandatory because the division mentions it in their communications. Other families are unaware that testing is an available option if they want objective data on where their child stands relative to national norms. Both are worth knowing.

Why Some Families Choose Standardized Testing Anyway

Even though testing isn't required, there are legitimate reasons some Saskatchewan home-based education families use standardized assessment:

College and university preparation. If your child intends to write Saskatchewan provincial Grade 12 examinations as an independent candidate to earn post-secondary credentials, understanding where they stand against grade-level benchmarks starting in earlier grades helps you course-correct before high school. A CAT score in Grade 6 doesn't appear on any transcript, but it gives you useful diagnostic information.

Identifying learning gaps. Standardized tests surface gaps that parent-guided learning can sometimes miss. A child who has excellent verbal reasoning but struggles with procedural mathematics may not show obvious signs in a home environment where the parent adjusts instruction intuitively. Periodic testing makes the gap explicit.

Personal reassurance. Some parents find it genuinely useful to see objective confirmation that their child is at or above grade level. This isn't about satisfying the school division — it's about the parent's own confidence in the educational program they're delivering.

Demonstrating progress in a dispute. In the rare situation where a school division raises questions about the adequacy of an Annual Progress Report, having a CAT score from that year is concrete evidence that learning occurred.

What the Annual Progress Report Actually Needs to Contain

If you're not using a standardized test, your Annual Progress Report needs to document progress in each core subject area: language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, health education, the arts, and physical education.

"Document progress" is the operative standard. The Regulations do not require you to demonstrate mastery of specific provincial curriculum outcomes, prove that your child has completed a certain number of lessons, or show that learning occurred on any particular schedule. The bar is that educational progress happened and you can describe it.

In practice, Annual Progress Reports that work well tend to include:

• A brief narrative for each subject area (2–4 sentences describing what was covered and how the child progressed)
• A few samples of work — a writing assignment, a math test or worksheet, a project description, a photo of a hands-on activity
• A list of resources used (curriculum titles, books read, programs completed)

Families who struggle with the Annual Progress Report are almost always families who kept no contemporaneous records and are writing it from memory in June. If you maintain a simple log — a notebook, a shared Google Doc, a photo album — throughout the year, the report is a 30-minute task.

What Your Division Can Ask and Cannot Ask

Some school divisions, particularly those with administrators who are unfamiliar with the Regulations or who interpret their role more broadly than the law allows, ask for things the Regulations don't require. Common overreach includes:

• Requesting mid-year progress updates or check-in meetings
• Asking for lesson plans or scope and sequence documents
• Stating that the Annual Progress Report must be formatted in a specific way tied to provincial curriculum outcomes
• Suggesting that standardized test results are required for the report to be accepted

None of these are regulatory requirements. The Regulations limit division oversight to administrative verification: did the family submit a Written Educational Plan at the start of the year, and did they submit an Annual Progress Report at the end? That's the scope of mandatory division interaction.

If your division requests something beyond this, you are not obligated to comply. Politely declining and referencing the specific Regulations is appropriate. If the division attempts to refuse your registration or Annual Progress Report on the basis that you didn't meet a non-regulatory requirement, the Regulations include a dispute resolution process.

The Saskatchewan Legal Withdrawal Blueprint walks through both the standard annual cycle and how to handle division requests that go beyond what the Regulations require — including the exact provisions to reference if a dispute arises.

The Practical Takeaway

No mandatory standardized testing. No certified evaluator. No provincial benchmark your child has to meet. Your Annual Progress Report — a parent-authored description of what your child studied and how they progressed — is the only annual assessment requirement.

If you want to add standardized testing on top of that, your school division is required to make it available. But the choice is yours.

Keep records throughout the year. Submit your Annual Progress Report in the spring. That's the full picture.

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