Literacy is the crucial building block of all future learning. In Malta’s case it is in need of urgent renovation and repair.
Malta’s 2010 results in the Programme for International Assessment showed that over 36 per cent of Maltese 15 year-olds were low achievers in reading literacy compared with the European Union average of almost 20 per cent.
In the 2011 Progress in International Reading Study, the mean reading score of Maltese 10-year-olds was significantly lower than the international average.
Weak literacy skills are not only a handicap in themselves but also hinder students’ ability to learn other subjects.
These are worrying trends and Education Minister Evarist Bartolo has rightly immediately unveiled a programme to try to reverse this debilitating weakness at the very heart of the education system.
He has launched a National Literacy Strategy for All for public consultation, in tandem with a National Literacy Campaign to target different sectors of society. There are various strands to the Government’s ambitious strategy.
Empirical evidence points to the need for comprehensive interventions spanning different years and targeting key points in the education system. The current fragmentation of educational services and literacy programmes needs to be reduced and the strategies and services being offered better integrated to improve continuity. The existing programmes are to be consolidated and extended further to ensure increased effectiveness.
For the National Strategy for All to be a success the full commitment of different parts of government will be crucial.
To reach the widest audience, the strategy will feature elements of lifelong and ‘life-wide’ education, stressing inter-generational education as espoused by Unesco, thus emphasising the strong relationship between children’s literacy and the literacy of those who care for them.
Teachers, heads of schools and principals are to be enabled to plan and implement their own projects for literacy support to individual students. This is to be achieved through grant awards for projects proposed by the schools. A school-leaving strategy addressing the educational system’s “casualties” is being unveiled as well as an EU-funded project focusing on disadvantaged children, including those at risk of poverty because the educational system failed them.
The strategy places great importance in our nominally-bilingual country on the ability to move easily between Maltese and English because this enables access to a wide and varied linguistic heritage.
More importantly, dual literacy competence, if fully embedded within the education system, will provide Maltese children with an essential lifeline to the world of science, information technology and commerce as well as better international and domestic employment opportunities.
The Minister for Education has unveiled an ambitious but vitally important strategy for fundamental change in Malta’s educational system. It will inevitably take time for it to bear fruit. It is a strategy for the long haul.
A good education is the birthright of every Maltese child. A high standard of national education is one of the keys to Malta’s future success as a modern society and the prime medium for achieving sustainable economic growth and personal human development.
Despite the commendably high investment in education that was made in recent decades, which has served to expand capacity and choice, the educational system has failed too many students and has not led to corresponding improvements in standards.
Tackling literacy is the essential first step to achieving an overdue revolution in standards. The Government’s initiative is to be commended.