Updated: Adds MUT reaction - Maltese teachers are spending much less time at school than their European counterparts, according to a new report.

The availability of Maltese teachers in public and private schools in the 2010/11 scholastic year stood at 28 hours a week – one of the lowest in the EU, a report issued by Eurydice, a European network of Education, found.

This included 26 hours of teaching time for primary teachers and 20 hours of teaching time for teachers at secondary level.

The report defines “availability at school” as the amount of time each week teachers must be available, including teaching time, for performing duties at school or in another place specified by the school head.

At 28 hours a week, Maltese teachers spend fewer hours in school than those in many other EU states, although the survey does not take preparation and correction time into consideration.

However, it excludes preparation and correction hours which may be carried out by teachers at home.

Comparing like with like, the teachers’ European counterparts are spending much more time at their schools or in classrooms.

In 2010/11 teachers in Portugal were available at school for 35 hours a week, followed by 32 hours in the UK and Sweden and 30 hours in Germany, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus.

Other member states like Estonia, Latvia, France, Denmark and Romania consider a 40-hour week to be the minimum of a teacher’s working week.

Various calls made in the past years to increase Malta’s school hours, which is deemed as one effective way of enticing more women to return to employment, have been resisted by the Malta Union of Teachers.

Last year, following a call by the Chamber of Commerce, Enterprise and Industry for school hours to be revised, the MUT vehemently opposed the idea and declared the proposal as “not negotiable”. A similar recommendation made by a British education expert received the same response.

University of Nottingham professor Roger Murphy, who has followed developments in Malta for years, had identified the short school hours as one of the main ailments of the island’s educational system.

He had said that when compared with a wide range of other education systems in developed countries, students in Malta were still receiving a very “low number of hours of schooling”. The MUT had also rejected this argument saying schooling hours in Malta “largely correspond to those of the rest of Europe”.

According to a European Commission study published last year, 78 per cent of Maltese fourth and fifth formers attended some kind of private lessons in 2008 – the highest level in the EU.

The report showed the private lessons industry had become almost crucial for Maltese students. The study concluded this was having a negative effect on students as it was “restricting children’s leisure time in a way that is psychologically and educationally undesirable”.

MUT: WORKING HOURS ARE NOT AN ISSUE FOR DISCUSSION

In a reaction, the Malta Union of Teachers said this morning that  working hours for teaching grades in Malta are on par with most other EU and Mediterranean countries.

It said working hours are not decided upon by an arbitrary decision by the union, but are agreed upon in agreements between the employers and the union.

"Both the ministry and the union have declared that working hours are not an issue up for discussion"

The union said the  article failed to make comparisons in areas such as:
Working environments - whereby some of the older schools are literally falling apart;

Reform fatigue – where teaching grades in Malta have faced what appears to be the largest number of reforms, some without any consultation, in the whole of Europe;

Take home pay – whereby teaching grades have salaries that are much lower than those in the countries mentioned in the same article;

Lack of Resources – whereby many teaching grades need to buy their own resources to be able to teach their classes.