In a recent speech, the Prime Minister announced that CHOGM discussions will concentrate on three main themes. One of these will be the role and contributions of islands and small states within the Commonwealth. I suspect that very few Maltese are aware that Malta was a pioneer in this field of endeavour with its input going back to the early 1980s.
I had the honour of contributing to the development of this interest in islands and small states through the auspices of the Commonwealth Secretariat’ Education Division since my PhD research at London University had touched on the subject. My work came to the attention of the formidable Steve Packer then the driving force behind the Secretariat’s island and small states initiative.
In 1985, Mr Packer invited me to join a Pan-Commonwealth Education Experts’ meeting held in the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. There I presented two papers entitled ‘The impact of scale, isolation and dependence on educational development in Malta’ and ‘Issues influencing the professional development of teachers and administrators in Malta’.
Other papers were presented by Colin Brock, Kasim Bacchus and Mark Bray, three academics who made quite a name for themselves in this sphere of education. For example, Bray became the director of the International Institute of Educational Planning (IIEP) in Paris, Bacchus, who was born in Guyana, became a renowned leader amongst Canadian academics, while Brock is still acknowledged as the leading British academic in the field.
Even though we came from countries thousands of miles apart, the smallness and island features rendered our concerns almost identical
The Mauritius meeting helped to document in a scholarly approach what many educators in small states had held through intuition and practice. The meeting’s participants established that small educational systems have an ecology of their own, they have numerous common positive as well as negative features, and that we could learn from each other’s experiences.
For example, we identified the benefits of smallness compared to conditions in much larger countries where problems can loom large in insurmountable proportions. In contrast, our problems can be tackled fairly quickly and relatively cheaply. We acknowledged and categorised the benefits and limitations of open transparent societies where secrets are hard to keep, and where close family and neighbourly relationships render decision-making far more onerous than in big anonymous bureaucracies.
In small states, policy decisions that go wrong can be easily traced to their originators and wrong decisions can be rectified before much harm has occurred. Lack of finance, shortages of human and material resources cause perennial headaches to administrators in small states.
The 1985 Mauritius meeting also set the agenda for future initiatives. These included three main areas. Priority would be given to the writing of a series of handbooks specifically aimed to assist educators in small states to identify their problems and help deal with them through the experiences of their counterparts in other small states.
The second project would be to set up a post-graduate degree programme in educational administration designed to research this subject from the perspectives of small nations. The third initiative was to set up in one of our countries, with branches in other countries, an institute devoted to the issues of small states.
Steve Packer coordinated the book series project with the result that several publications emerged. In this area, I teamed up with my very good friend, the late Paul Attard to write a handbook for multi-functional administrators in small states. Practitioners who made use of the handbook told us that they found its content most useful and practical. Although all came from different small states, they asked us whether we had researched the administrative issues of their specific country because the book contents so realistically reflected the conditions that dominated their organisations.
When Fr. Peter Serracino Inglott became rector in 1987, I suggested to him to set up an institute within the University. He immediately took up the idea and established the Institute for Islands and Small States at the Old University Building in Valletta. Fr. Peter offered me to head the institute provided I resigned my deanship of the Faculty of Education. With such a condition, I rejected the offer with a ‘thank you but no thank you.’
For a time, the very able Leslie Agius, who had just retired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, gave shape to the institute, in spite of his copious other responsibilities at the Foundation for International Studies.
Eventually, Lino Briguglio took over the directorship and greatly expanded its scope and activities with research and publications in the realms of economics, finance, sociology, ecology, and environmental issues, among others.
I continued my work with the initial Pan-Commonwealth Experts group, which allowed me to visit several exotic islands. I also undertook to set up and run the post-graduate programme in Educational Planning and Administration in Small States at the University of Malta.
The course attracted high education officials from island and small states in the Commonwealth who came to Malta to study, research and explore through academic rigour the issues that impacted on their administrative work back home.
The Secretariat provided most of the financing by supporting participants’ tuition, accommodation and subsistence, the University of Malta offered all the administrative, plant and backup facilities, while the sending country paid for the participants’ airfares. The Maltese government offered two scholarships to Maltese nationals in each course.
I directed three 12-month highly successful courses, which brought to Malta high education officials from Cyprus, The Maldives, Tonga, the Seychelles, Botswana, Cameroon, St Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda. The participants returned home eventually to reach the highest posts (ministers, permanent secretaries, directors general) in their respective education administrations.
They also returned home with very fond memories of their stay in Malta.
The most significant lesson they, and I, learnt from this course was how similar our management issues were, even though we came from countries thousands of miles apart. The smallness and island features rendered our concerns almost identical.
At the end of the third course, the Secretariat “sundowned” (their expression) the course since it had reached its objective of training a core of expert educational administrators who in turn were able to train new acolytes in the field. The Secretariat decided to divert the funds to other areas. This occurred at a time when the newly-elected rector, Roger Ellul Micallef, had invited me to become his pro-rector and I too had to divert my attention and energy to new initiatives at the University, a task I undertook for the next 10 years.
Fortunately, Briguglio and the institute in Valletta kept Malta’s initial work in the islands and small states field alive. In addition, other academics like Godfrey Baldacchino in education, Edward Warrington in the area of public policy and administration and Gordon Galea in medicine, kept Malta’s flag flying in this realm. There may well be other Maltese working in this field of whom I am not aware since I have been cut off from the subject area for two decades.
I augur that the CHOGM meeting, where islands and small states issues will feature prominently, will fire the interest in this area among local practitioners and academics. I firmly believe that the Maltese with their historical background and cross-fertilisation of ideas coming from our numerous international contacts can leave a most positive impact in this sphere.
We have two great assets.
We have individuals with exceptional drive and abilities. We also have a sound reputation in the field because other small states trust our initiatives since we have no axes to grind nor do we have intentions to dominate or exploit. Consequently, the Maltese contribution can be a truly positive one.
Charles Farrugia is the Commissioner for Education at the Office of the Ombudsman.