Education for wealth creation

Only a successful economy combined with social justice can create wealth, jobs and ensure that no one falls behind. We face a future where we have to build a viable economy without the traditional instruments of policy: whatever loses money, subsidise it with taxpayers' money and let it go on, business as usual, without addressing the underlying problems necessitating subsidies in the first place.

No country does not subsidise its economic activity somehow but over the years we have allowed the politics of subsidies to practically everything and everyone to cut us off from the reality of having to put our house in order to survive and thrive in the 21st century. The biggest challenge we face is building a new economy while we see our old economy declining. All our economic and social policies have now to be geared towards life after all the transitional arrangements negotiated with the European Union run out.

How will the shipyards become viable? Will new foreign direct investment flow in to create new jobs? Will agriculture modernise itself and survive after it loses all protection? Will we manage to improve our tourism product and compete successfully with other destinations?

We are not a low-cost location any more and even private firms are finding it difficult to keep their production units in Malta when they can operate them more cheaply in other locations. We are told we have to compete on quality by offering the ability and talents of our workforce. A focused education and retraining policy aimed at equipping our people with employable and adaptable skills is the only way forward.

We have learned the proper buzzwords: we must equip our people with the necessary functional and electronic literacy skills to live and work in the knowledge society and economy. A smart workforce making Malta an attractive location for investment should be our main priority.

Buzzwords are not enough

We are lagging behind the European average. In the EU 21.8% of the labour force has completed tertiary education compared to Malta's 8.8%; 42.9% of the working population has a secondary level education while in Malta it's only 9.5%. In the EU 8.5% of those aged 25 to 64 are still going through some formal learning experience, in Malta only 4.4% are doing so.

Citizens living in a knowledge society and workers operating in a knowledge economy need a strong science and technology culture. Research carried out by Dr Joseph N. Grima and Professor Alfred J. Vella shows that even many students following a first-degree science course at University lack the necessary maths and science skills. They concluded that students taking physics with chemistry, computer science or IT usually joined the course with an intermediate certificate in mathematics, obtained in sixth form. In their case too, "past experience has demonstrated that they experience difficulties in physics related to lack of sufficient mathematical skills".

The authors held that while a SEC level of mathematics may be sufficient to allow students to follow the biology component of a degree course satisfactorily, "it is certainly unacceptable as far as the chemistry component is concerned. At the tertiary level, many courses in chemistry are meant to include theories and models that describe and explain physical and chemical phenomena". They are also alarmed by the recent rise in the popularity of Paper B in the maths SEC examination, calling the trend "very worrying."

If our more "successful" students, those who manage to make it to University are making us worried, how should we react to the fact that 40% of our school leavers come to their end of their formal schooling without employable skills? More than 2,000 teenagers, half our students, are failing when they complete their basic education every year. Government has still to come up with an 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 they need today.

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. 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 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. Modern vocational subjects should be introduced in these schools.

Concluding his budget speech for 2003, Minister Dalli said that joining the EU would guarantee a dramatic improvement of our education system and make it one of the best in the world. Yet there are EU founder members whose decades of membership has not served to make their education system the best in the world. It is up to us to improve our education system.

Needed: a world-class education

Last November the OECD published the evaluation it carried out on the quality of the education system of 32 advanced countries. The study is called PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and is based on tests carried out on 14 and 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.

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 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.

We must start taking part in international surveys like PISA to help us set benchmarks for our system to beat our in-built insularity and set targets for our children and youngsters within the context of the skills they need to be able to compete successfully with children and youngsters growing up in other countries and competing with us for investment and markets worldwide.