A class of eight- and nine-year-olds, dressed in red-and-black jerseys in honour of their city’s ice-hockey team, gather around laptops and tablets in an elementary school on the outskirts of Ottawa.

Their teacher, Lisa Langsford, moves between the groups of children as they discuss the work they have created on Google Drive and on a coding programme called Scratch.

At a first glance, the lesson at St. John the Apostle School looks like a computing class. But students are in fact developing their literacy skills while working collaboratively.

Half of the class give feedback on narratives written by students on Google Drive while the others create dialogues between animated characters as part of a persuasive writing task.

“They are still doing writing but it is more motivating and exciting for them,” Langsford says.

It is an everyday scene from a schools system that educationalists in the UK enviously refer to as the “best in the English-speaking world”.

Pupils in Ontario, Canada’s most populated province, already achieve impressive scores in literacy. Last year, it was rated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as one of the global top performers for reading in its Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study, which tests 15-year-olds around the world.

Now, school boards across the province are pushing teachers to embrace technology, as in Langsford’s class, to help students develop “global competencies” and engage more with “deep learning” (see box, below).

Familiar surroundings

But much of what you witness in Ontario’s schools feels familiar, and would not look out of place in England.

Across the province, elementary teachers display word walls, reading strategies and students’ writing work in their classrooms, while students dive into books in comfortable reading spaces.

Children as young as 4 take part in guided reading and writing - which are run in smaller groups of pupils of the same level - and are then sent home with a reading book of the appropriate standard.

But educators in Ontario say it is consistent support and resources from the government that have made the difference and driven the success - and, for many, the election of Liberal Dalton McGuinty as the province’s premier in 2003 was an important turning point.

Sitting in a hotel room looking out across Toronto’s financial district, world-renowned Canadian educationalist Michael Fullan - who was McGuinty’s special adviser - says that their education reforms led to “out-and-out success” in literacy.

“We said: ‘It is a focus - it is not going away. It has to be a priority for every school and we will infuse capacity-building strategies into that equation and we will get results,’” he says.

Any resemblance to England is probably not coincidental, as Fullan worked with Sir Michael Barber to evaluate New Labour’s numeracy and literacy drive which, he concluded in 2002, had helped pupil achievement to rise.

But today Fullan says that the experience informed what Ontario should not do and what doesn’t work as much as what does. He is particularly clear that the “punitive” English targets and high-stakes accountability culture should not be replicated.

“We learned from England two things not to do,” he says. “One was not to be too heavy-handed on accountability.

“We said that is not motivating and it is not Ontario style. So we had a light touch on accountability. And we were careful to not obsess with targets.

“We had targets but they were more aspirational. They were not like the English. It is heavily politicised over there.”

Instead, in Ontario, the emphasis has been on involving teachers from the start to help create a collaborative culture.

Fullan says this was particularly necessary following a turbulent period of teacher strikes, funding cuts and stagnant test scores that preceded McGuinty, who, by promising and delivering a change, became known as “the education premier”.

Today, teaching has become a very popular and well-paid profession in Ontario. The fact that jobs in schools are so sought after and oversubscribed helps to explain why Canadian teachers are increasingly coming to the UK.

Fullan was at the Toronto hotel to speak to hundreds of educators from around the world who had gathered to learn from some of Ontario’s innovative practices.

Following a patriotic performance of national anthem O Canada by students from a local secondary school, Bruce Rodrigues, Ontario’s deputy minister of education, proudly praises their “world-class system”.

“I can assure you that the world’s leading jurisdictions continue to look to Ontario as a model,” he says. “Because what we do here in education, and how we do it, is valued across the globe.”

Ontario’s Achilles heel

But is Ontario as good as many boast? And should it still be held up as a case study? Despite improvements to literacy and achieving record-high graduation rates, there is a crack in Ontario’s success story: the province’s maths scores continue to decline.

Experts across the sector can’t pinpoint one sole cause of the problem, but they suggest that a lack of maths expertise, misguided instruction or too much focus on literacy may have played a part.

Ontario has been looking to its neighbour, Quebec - which outperforms the province in global education studies, in maths and other subjects - to try to solve the conundrum. And, it seems, spending more “time on task” could be the answer.

As part of a renewed focus on maths, Ontario schools are now required to teach at least 60 minutes a day of maths instruction in every elementary school and “lead teachers” in maths have been introduced.

The different view that teachers and parents take towards maths compared to literacy is partially to blame for the gap, according to Colleen MacDonald, coordinator for early years at Ottawa Catholic School Board.

“All teachers in the board are comfortable [with literacy] and they truly believe that it is an essential skill,” she says.

“We would never accept it if a child said ‘I can’t read’. Whereas, sometimes, if a child says ‘I am no good at maths’, our response may be, ‘Me neither, it’s hard.’ But we are changing that.”

Cathy Montreuil, assistant deputy minister at the student achievement division of Ontario’s Ministry of Education, insists that rethinking maths is a global problem that is not unique to the province, but that does not mean it is being ignored.

“[Ontario’s] strength is its willingness to learn itself forward,” she says. And this commitment is clear in the ministry’s $60 million (£34 million) investment into boosting students’ achievement in mathematics.

The importance of equity

Another priority for Ontario is equity; ensuring that students from all backgrounds are able to succeed. The province’s efforts in this area have been already been highlighted by the OECD. And now it is trying to better them with the introduction of full-day kindergarten across Ontario to try to level the playing field for all children (see box, below).

However, getting all children to the expected reading levels can feel like a big ask for some teachers who are working in more challenging areas. In a small elementary school in a deprived neighbourhood east of Toronto, children arrive at school unable to identify the first letter of their name.

Danielle Cosburn, a kindergarten teacher at Highcastle Public School, which has a high number of children who have English as an additional language, says: “We had more students come in this year than we have ever seen who couldn’t even hold a pencil or couldn’t identify their name.”

Instead of just expecting the child to read a book, like their peers, the teachers ask these pupils to roll a letter dice to try to identify letters.

“Are they ready to be reading and to be pushed on it?” she asks. “That is where we struggle with the transition into Grade 1 because their journey is slower.”

But Cosburn is confident that the Toronto District School Board is trying hard to close the gap and provide greater opportunities for these children.

“They are trying to bridge it [the gap],” she says. “I really think they are working really hard. There are amazing leaders out there.”

It is a faith in official education policy that one hears repeated in schools across the province - and it appears in marked contrast to the discontent that is often found in England’s classrooms.

Ontario may not be perfect. However, the province’s accomplishments do suggest that large-scale reform to an education system can succeed when its teachers are on board.