"More than half of school leavers fail to reach basic standards in GCSE English and maths..." (Daily Mail, June 2, 2006).

"Finnish schoolchildren taking part in Programme for International Student (PISA) Assessment have come out top of all the 15 member countries of the OECD." (http://global.finland.fi/ uutiset/teksti_popup.php?id=4606)

The above two quotes should lead us as a country to think seriously on the models that we try to emulate. While in the former we see how half baked, going to basics approaches will not bring real change, not even if like in the case of the British experience you double your national spending on education (from £29 billion in 1997 to £56.5 billion this year), the latter should lead our policy makers to want to learn what is behind such amazing performance.

Finland has invested in a challenging project of providing inclusive education throughout the education system. They did this through instilling the system with sufficient flexibility to make it possible to include everyone and to adapt to individual needs. They moved from putting ideals on paper to drawing up a realistic but at the same time "human rights-based approach to education which recognises that everyone is entitled to equal treatment in the school classroom irrespective of one's disabilities". (Heikki Kokkola, education adviser at the department for development policy in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs).

They had the courage to put a strategy in place to make possible what many countries, including our own, have for years put in their national curricula but failed to translate into the required changes that would make it possible for all children to be taught together while the teacher makes alternating arrangements to take care of different needs of each child in the same school, in the same classroom.

It is for the above reasons that I worry when I read statements like the ones made by Grace Grima (The Times, June 13), where she stated that "nobody would benefit if you have children of different abilities in the same class". This is simply the opposite of results from research in inclusion, differentiated instruction and sociological studies, not to say the fundamental ethos of any modern democratic state. This country needs to decide in favour of inclusion and remove all obstacles in favour of adapting the curriculum to learners' needs whereby a wide range of strategies and flexibility of timing and approach are adopted so as to attend to the needs of the learners within an all inclusive environment. If we continue to patch, putting old wines in new vessels without really putting new thinking, unencumbered with old, folkloristic educational myths, often derived from personal, uncritical analysis of the educational scene and educational research, we are destined to continue wasting the lives of many children and youth who leave the educational system bruised and with no lifelong skills to learn.

I truly hope that Dr Grima was misquoted and this is not the direction that the reviewing committee which is assessing the examination system is taking.

The author is assistant lecturer at the University of Malta's Programme in Teaching for Diversity.

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