Education Minister Evarist Bartolo has told members of the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development that “the education system is in crisis and needs to be made more relevant to contemporary society”. Those who follow the educational scene have been aware of this alarming reality for years.
Why it has taken this country decades to “admit that we have an educational problem” is not a mystery. Despite the fact that there is no shortage of political rhetoric on the importance of education, report after report keeps pointing out shortcomings and suggesting improvements but these usually end up gathering dust on some office shelf.
After his strong statement, one would have expected to see concrete plans on how the minister intends to address the educational crisis.
The launching of a 10-year strategic plan is undoubtedly a critical success factor in the management of this crisis. However the minister has, like his predecessors, failed to first identify the causes that have undermined our educational system for decades.
The European Commission has, in the past few years, indicated that Malta’s poor educational achievement levels are a threat to the country’s future prosperity. It went further and urged the government to conduct a study to identify the causes of this failure.
Unfortunately, this study has still not been commissioned. In the last election campaign, the political debate on education was characterised by a superficial argument on stipends and the granting of tablet devices to students.
Those who face the day-to-day problems of teaching young unmotivated students know that the real challenges facing our educational system are very different from those perceived by political leaders. Only a few weeks ago, a very passionate head of school identified some of the social causes lurking beneath the troubled surface of our educational system.
The minister of education has given some significant statistics that confirm the symptoms of the problems debilitating the educational system. He also appealed to the University, the colleges and other institutions to tell him what they are doing wrong and why the students’ courses are not matching the country’s realities.
For too long the stakeholders in the educational system – policymakers, employers, teachers, unions, parents and students – have resorted to ‘kicking the can’ away from their feet and shifting the blame for failure away from their doors.
One just hopes that the Framework for the Education Strategy for Malta 2014-2024 was drawn up after proper in-depth analysis of the causes that undermine the educational system, even if such analysis has so far not been made public.
A prerequisite for a proper educational strategy is intensive consultation with teachers and their unions. Teachers need to understand that they must submit themselves to robust and regular performance evaluation if the educational system and their own status as professionals are to improve.
With employers complaining that they are finding that new graduates from the University and colleges are not prepared well enough for the workplace, they must realise that they can no longer consider the educational institutions as mere suppliers of trained labour.
Businesses are indispensable partners and a vitally important element in the change programme that the country needs to pull the educational system out of the crisis it is in.
Finally, policymakers need to engage more with parents and students themselves and involve other social sciences professionals to understand the issues behind low educational achievement that seem to be endemic in certain areas.