Speak to any foreign parents regarding school summer holidays and you soon start realising why the Maltese education system is so stressful to students, parents and teachers alike.
While Maltese students and teachers’ summer holidays are about three months long, most schools in the UK, for example, only have a six-week break, approximately from the last week of July to the second week of September.
When you add to these three months the holidays in mid-term, Christmas, Easter, as well as for teachers’ occasional ‘professional development days’, school outings, and so on, the result is that the Maltese ‘scholastic year’ is approximately only seven-and-a-half months long.
Now consider the length of the school day. At the school my children attend, lessons start at 8.30 a.m. and end at 2.30 p.m. for junior school, and 2.50 p.m. for senior school.
Some schools evidently end earlier as I often see schoolgirls arriving home by around 1.30 p.m., although they may start a little earlier.
So, allowing about an hour for school breaks, that leaves only about five hours of schooling per day, or 25 per week. And teachers actually have even less contact hours with students per week.
Now throw into the mix the Maltese school syllabus, which is well-known to be overloaded, and the final ingredient: parents’ very high standards of expectations of academic achievement from their children. What have you got? A pressure cooker, and an all-round lose-lose situation.
Students are stressed out because teachers are forced to cram as much teaching as possible in as little time as possible, and give loads of homework to reinforce what little they are able to do in class.
This leaves students precious little free time to undertake extra-curricular activities, let alone spend ‘quality time’ with their families. Stressed-out students are also more likely to vent their frustration on their teachers, parents, siblings and friends.
Parents are also stressed out trying to help their children do their homework as fast as possible and shuttling them to and from after-school activities.
In my household, notwithstanding our best efforts, one of my children regularly ends up finishing the last homework task at around 10 p.m. When one adds to this all the housework that needs to be done, often after a day at work, there is little quality time left to relax or communicate with the husband/wife or partner.
Teaching is said to be one of the most stressful and poorly paid of the local professions. If this is true it would explain why there is more demand than supply in most areas of the teaching profession, including the primary sector. One might wonder why this is so, when their working day is so short and holidays so generous.
My guess is that teachers are stressed out because they have to cram the overloaded syllabus into too little class time, and then have to correct too much homework afterwards. They also probably have a hard time trying to teach and control the children who are themselves stressed, and so are more likely not to understand what is being taught, or worse, couldn’t be bothered.
The popularity of private lessons is a phenomenon probably unique to Malta. One even hears of already high-achieving students being sent to private lessons in summer just “for revision”.
With the little teaching time available within school hours and the overloaded syllabus, coupled with parents’ high expectations and teachers’ short working day, all the demand and supply ingredients are present for self-sustaining growth.
There are various causes for concern over private lessons. Teachers who give such lessons might be tempted to ease off on their strenuous efforts to teach during school hours in order to boost demand for their services after school hours for extra pay.
The students they teach both at school and at private lessons may get to know beforehand or, worse still, be coached specifically on those topics that the teachers know are coming out in school exams or Matsec exams.
In this day and age when air-conditioning can relieve much of the discomfort of the summer heat, how can three months’ summer holidays still be justified?
Understandably, the Malta Union of Teachers (MUT) would fight tooth and nail against any shortening of the summer holidays or extension of school hours. After all, when would teachers be able to conduct private lessons or do second jobs to supplement their income?
The MUT is currently in a long-running dispute with the Ministry of Education. Indeed, the source of teachers’ anger is that, in 2007, a few weeks after the MUT signed an agreement with the ministry that capped teachers’ salary increases to modest levels, the government was forced to sign much more generous agreements with the doctors and nurses’ unions, ahead of the transfer to Mater Dei Hospital.
Now, if I were the Education Minister, and if public finances allowed it, I would try to resolve the various above-mentioned issues, which cause excessive stress to students, parents and teachers alike, by proposing a package that offered teachers more generous financial remuneration in return for shorter summer holidays and a longer school day and, at the same time, introduce greater accountability and improved quality control.
A longer school day and shorter holidays would allow teachers more time to go through the syllabus, and for students to learn. This in itself should already result in less stress for both teachers and students.
If teachers have more time in class to ensure students have learnt a topic, there should also be less need for homework. Less homework would mean more time for extra-curricular activities and more time for family members to communicate with each other.
More time within class coupled with greater accountability and improved quality control should hopefully translate into a better standard of teaching within school hours, and therefore less need for parents to fork out extra money for private lessons.
I am sure parents would prefer their children to be learning at their regular school than attending summer schools, private lessons, or even worse, completely wasting their time watching TV, surfing Facebook, chatting on MSN and the phone, playing on their Playstations or Nintendo DSs, idling on the beaches and generally vegetating.
I know many teachers reading this may be horrified at the suggestion of cutting by half their precious three-month summer holidays, and doing away with their summer half-days and short working hours.
But perhaps many would consider working longer hours if their pay was raised sufficiently to compensate them, or make up for loss of potential additional earnings from second jobs or private lessons.
Higher teachers’ pay may mean higher school fees in private schools, unless they could benefit from some sort of state subsidy. But in any case, many parents who choose such schools may consider it worth paying more for a better service.
If teachers can be given sufficient financial compensation and they realise that, ultimately, such changes would lead to a less stressful and higher quality education system, my guess is that even they would realise the result would be a win-win situation that benefits not only themselves, but also students, parents, and ultimately society in general.
Have your say
If you wish to contribute an article or would like a particular subject to be tackled in the Edu-cation section, call Davinia Hamilton on 2559 4513 or e-mail dhamilton@timesofmalta.com.