Minister Galea: the 2,000 exist!

Trying to defend his record as Education Minister in the last four years Dr Louis Galea lashed out at me during the parliamentary debate on the budget. He accused me of playing around with statistics to give the false impression that there are at least 2,000 teenagers completing their secondary education every year without acquiring the skills they need to live and work in the world of the 21st century.

At present the only benchmark our education system uses to measure our students' performance is the Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) exam run by the Matsec Board of the University. Only students who get Grades 1 to 5 qualify to continue post-secondary education. Grades 6 and 7 have no currency with employers.

How many students are managing to get SEC Grades 1 to 5 after at least 11 years of schooling? According to official statistics given by Minister Galea in Parliament (PQ 34,383), out of 5,092 students who completed their secondary education last year, 1,101 (22%) did not even bother to sit for any May 2002 SEC exam. Another 1,338 students (26%) failed to get a pass mark in Maltese, English and Mathematics (MEM); so 2,439 failed to pass their SEC exams in MEM. These 2,439 young people exist, even if Dr Galea prefers not to see them.

Detailed statistics given by Minister Galea (PQ 35,137) show that male teenagers are falling behind female teenagers in their education. Of 1,338 who failed in MEM 702 were young men while 636 were young women; 27% of the 2,620 male students and 26% of the 2,472 female students who completed their secondary education last year failed to pass any of the three main subjects in the SEC exam. While 391 girls (16%) did not sit for any SEC exam, 710 (27%) of the boys did not sit for any SEC exam.

This means that 1,412 (54%) of the 2,620 boys who completed their secondary education last year either failed or did not even sit for the SEC exams in MEM; 1027 (42%) of the 2,472 girls who completed their secondary education last year failed or did not even sit the SEC exams in MEM.

The Minister is not concerned that half of our secondary school students fail their SEC exams in MEM. In Parliament Dr Galea proclaimed himself to be very satisfied with what he has done to the system in the last four years and boasted that it is among the best in the world. He produced no evidence whatsoever to back his claims.

Two days after he talked about the world superiority of our education system, the governor of the Central Bank, Michael Bonello, came to a very different conclusion. Addressing a seminar on December 11 about "The strengths and weaknesses in Malta's competitive position", he said: "The last dimension of government efficiency in relation to competitiveness considered here is the adequacy of the education sector. Malta scores a relatively low 61% of the EU average compared to 80% in other candidate countries. Although Malta has relatively high pupil-teacher and school enrolment ratios, it scores less well in terms of literacy and of the availability of engineering and business skills. There is also a gap in the knowledge transfer between educational institutions and industry, and this is harnpering productive innovation."

Quality and equality

Finance Minister John Dalli also does not share Minister Galea's position that our education system is among the best in the world. Concluding his budget speech for 2003, he said that joining the European Union would guarantee a dramatic improvement of our education system and make it one of the best in the world.

This statement does not make sense at all as there are founder members of the EU whose decades of membership has not served to make their education system the best in the world. A few days before Minister Dalli presented his budget the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published the evaluation it carried out on the quality of the education system of 32 advanced countries. The study, PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), is based on tests carried out on 14-15-year-olds to measure their linguistic, mathematical, scientific and technological competence to solve problems in the real world.

According to this study South Korea has the best education system. Japan emerges in second place, and then comes Finland followed by Canada and Australia. Among the top five countries only Finland is in the EU which it joined only recently, but its education system is still better than that of EU founder members Italy, France and Germany. Even the education system of the Czech Republic, which has not joined the EU, placed tenth in this survey, ahead of those of EU founder members. The best systems are those that combine quality and equality: where the largest possible number of students succeeds and there is a very small gap between those who succeed and those who fall behind. Our system fails on both counts.

Malta did not take part in the PISA study. We need to start taking part in these international research projects to be able to gauge where our teenagers stand in relation to others around the world who compete with us for investment. Education and wealth creation go hand in hand and investment moves to those countries with a skilled workforce.

The high rate of failure of our students is threatening their personal future and jeopardising the economic prosperity and social cohesion of our country. More than 2,000 teenagers, half our students, are failing when they complete their basic education every year. Problems get worse by being hidden.

In the 2003 budget, as in every budget presented in the last four years, there is no action plan to deal with the failure and inadequacy of our education system to equip as many young people as possible with the skills and competences needed for the 21st century. A glance at May 2002 SEC exams results shows that boys are performing worse than girls in Government general secondary schools and junior lyceums. In Church schools there is no basic difference. It is only in the independent schools that boys performed much better than girls.

We need to understand this gender gap and address it without in any way diminishing the commitment to ensure that more girls succeed in their education. The present failure rate for both boys and girls is simply unacceptable.

This issue should concern all schools, as unqualified and poorly skilled boys and girls will grow into young men and women who become a problem for themselves and all others around them. Government area secondary schools and junior lyceums should put this issue as one of their main objectives in their school development plan. But even other schools cannot afford to ignore this problem. Unskilled and unqualified young men and women get caught in a vicious circle of drugs, crime, domestic violence, unemployment, social exclusion that is best dealt with through preventive social, educational and health policies.

Secondary schools need to change and become more relevant to the needs of the thousands of teenagers who are enrolled in them. These schools should at least succeed in giving these youngsters the basic literacy, numeracy, scientific and technological skills and democratic citizenship competences they need to live and work in the 21st century.

Both the winners and the losers of the present educational system need different secondary schools. Even those who are succeeding need to succeed differently. The present system is still based on an exam culture, which rewards memorisation of information about yesterday when we should be equipping our youngsters for the uncharted waters of tomorrow.