A future for thousands of young people

A new scholastic year has started but for many of those attending their final year in secondary education this new beginning will inevitably end in failure.

In the coming weeks around 2,000 young people will be celebrating their university graduation. But every year 2,000 teenagers "graduate" from secondary education without acquiring the skills and competencies they need to live and work in the 21st century. 877 young men attending 13 government general secondary schools and 678 young women attending nine general secondary schools completed their secondary education last June.

Two-thirds of the young men did not even sit for the Sec exam. Half the number of the young women did not sit for the Sec exam. The results were dismal.

Of the 877 students, only 45 walked away from 11 years of schooling with a pass (at Grade 5) in the Maltese Sec exam. Only 18 managed to pass their Sec exam in English. Only 27 passed their maths exam. Thirty-three obtained a pass in physics while seven scraped through their exam in computing.

The girls did slightly better. Of 678 students, 112 passed their Maltese Sec exam. Forty-one passed their exam in English. Twenty-seven obtained a pass in maths. Forty-one passed in physics while only 13 passed in computing.

More than 90 per cent of these young people completed their secondary education without acquiring any valid certification to help them move on in life. This is unacceptable. Our young people deserve better.

At the present moment the only recognised certification that enables young people to continue studying after leaving school or to find a job is the SEC exam certificate.

Teenagers leaving secondary school without obtaining this certificate are branded as failures even though the SEC exam fails to measure the other skills and competencies that they might have. In unemployment statistics, they are categorised as unqualified and unskilled.

We must change these secondary schools to make them relevant and meaningful for the students attending them. The government is still insisting that these students continue to go to schools with Junior Lyceum and SEC syllabi.

These students have already failed the Junior Lyceum entrance exam. Five years later they are made to sit the SEC exam that the Junior Lyceum students sit for. No wonder that most of them do not bother to sit for the exam, knowing they do not stand a chance.

We must have the courage to create an alternative for these students. In Malta our educational establishment is still bent on providing the same educational service to all students, a British hangover.

The Economist (July 14, 2001) reports that "Other European countries have no such hang-ups. Germany and the Netherlands, which are both instinctively egalitarian countries, nonetheless have secondary school systems that filter education into academic and vocational streams."

In Britain, such an idea would still be dismissed with horror as condemning the non-academic to sink schools and educational failure.

Yet the selective German and Dutch systems produce far fewer illiterate and innumerate school-leavers. England is trying to catch up with these continental countries.

In this new scholastic year the British government will be introducing GCSEs in vocational subjects and exams such as engineering, catering and tourism studies. We should also be introducing these new options in our secondary schools.

Recent discoveries in cognitive science and the light that is being shed on how we learn make discussions on "vocational" and "academic" education irrelevant and outdated.

We all learn in different ways and schools need to change to be able to teach, assess and certify students in different ways while ensuring parity in diversity. The present set-up in area secondary schools is destroying the future of thousands of young people.

We must transform these schools to create a new future for our young people.

Mr Bartolo is the MLP spokesman for education and national culture