Meeting the needs of contemporary parenthood

In today's fast moving world, parents, especially when both work, want to ensure that their children are in a caring environment right from the early years, while receiving a sound education. Experiencing regular periods of worry and anxiety in later years is a matter of serious concern demanding very careful weighing up of the various options available.

Thus ideally, an all-in-one school is sought, ensuring peace of mind right from the very start till the end of secondary school. With this in mind San Anton School went ahead and set up a nursery for children aged one year six months from where the children can continue to move on in the same school, right till school leaving age of 16.

San Anton School saw this need arising as more mothers are opting to establish a career and join the workforce. In recent months statistics have shown the great leap forward that has been made in the number of females graduating from University.

Most of them will quite rightly expect to join the labour force looking for jobs that offer career prospects. At the same time many will be establishing relationships which will eventually lead to marriage and the start of a family when sooner rather than later a child is born.

Up to a few years ago, the majority of women gave up their job to devote all their time to the newcomer. However, trends have changed mainly due to financial, social and psychological matters.

In some instances the role of the mother is taken over by grandmothers or nannies. However, other parents are faced with a problem when no one is available to care for their child, leaving them with the only option of choosing from a number of available day care centres.

Having taken such a step, parents can enjoy relative peace of mind - but only for a short period of time. All too soon, the child outgrows nursery schooling and the search is on again for a school that will provide education until the child attains secondary school age, when anxious times return with preparation for the secondary schools entrance examination.

If the child does well, the parents will once again be able to experience a period of peace that should last a few years. However, at San Anton School parents have their minds at rest for a considerable length of time.

Once their child has been placed at San Anton School's Day Care/ Reception class, they know that this leads to the Pre-Grade class, which in turn prepares for the next move to Early School.

After three years in the Early School, the child is ready to move into Middle School and four years later into Senior School. At the end of the five-year course of study at senior level, the students are ready to take the school-leaving examinations that provide them with the all-important entrance certificate into sixth form and beyond.

Having taken the decision to include a nursery, San Anton School can once again claim to be a pioneer in offering something new to parents. When it opened in 1988, it provided a clear demonstration of what can be achieved when a group of parents are determined enough to seek to give their children a good education through their years at school without the regular emotional upsets that dogged other children's footsteps.

To keep fees down to a bare minimum, it was decreed that the school should not aim to make profit. The decision at the time was to provide an education for children aged four to 16. It was also decided that the school would be co-educational right from primary and through secondary school.

Of course, this decision raised a number of eyebrows but developments since have proven the sceptics wrong. The mixture of sexes gives both boys and girls an awareness of the opposite sex that stands them in good stead in their adult life.

Another very important feature of San Anton School was to be its curriculum. Broad but ensuring in the early years that children acquire competence in literacy and in the handling of numbers, the educational programme encompassed the whole spectrum of a child's developmental process. This ranges from the physical to the cognitive and affective.

The other aspect of the curriculum that has always been kept very much in view is the need that its progress from one level to the next be made as smoothly as possible. This is right up to the time when students are prepared for the school-leaving examinations.

It is the task of the school's educational consultant to make sure that any changes a sector may wish to introduce in its educational programme can be seamlessly co-ordinated with the curriculum of the other sectors. Because of such smooth transitions, children never find themselves struggling to cope with material that is beyond them and they are thus never 'out of their depth'.

There are many challenges that children have to face during their time at school but at San Anton these are not as a result of an erratic curriculum.

In the years to come San Anton saw another important development. Many parents expressed their need to have a pre-school class for their children as part of San Anton School and thus the first pre-grade classes were introduced.

San Anton School has thus evolved in the 16 or so years of its existence. A school that provided a sound education to children within the limits set by the Compulsory Education Act; it is now an all-in-one-school that is meeting the needs of the contemporary family unit.

San Anton guarantees parents a caring environment for their children while they are still very young, leading to a sound, all-round education as they grow older.

The results that San Anton students achieve in their SEC examinations are an eloquent testimony to the efforts that teachers put in at every stage of the educational programme, ensuring that their students reach their full potential. A few examples should suffice to prove this.

At least 80 per cent of SEC candidates achieved grades I to V in English Language, Mathematics, Physics, French, Maltese, English Literature, Environmental Studies, Chemistry, Geography, Computer Studies, Home Economics, History and Religious Studies.

In English Language, Physics, Mathematics and Home Economics, the percentage rate was 90 and over.

The reassurance therefore that the school is able to cater for all the educational needs of a child from infancy to age 16 goes a long way to putting a parent's mind at rest that he/she has indeed made the right choice of schooling.

Mr Pisani is the Headmaster of San Anton School.