Education Minister Evarist Bartolo is in the media glare over corruption allegations concerning a person of trust he appointed to the Foundation of Tomorrow’s Schools. Also deserving of scrutiny though is his recent launch of ‘My Journey’, a reform in education that aims to increase the range of subject options in secondary school.
The document raises a number of important issues. There is general agreement that effective educational provision needs to be personalised according to the needs, interests and abilities of individual learners. The current mantras are: ‘One size does not fit all’ and ‘Achieving through different pathways’.
How ‘My Journey’ proposes to go about this presents continuities as well as differences with respect to the National Curriculum Framework of 2012, which this government has retained as a legal requirement. Contrary to the impression given at the launch of ‘My Journey’, our schools already provide optional vocational subjects as part of general secondary education that have parity of esteem with the traditional academic offerings. Indeed, the big challenge when vocational subjects were re-introduced in 2010 was to shed the legacy of second-class, lower-status provision from the 1970s and 1980s. This is why the first cohorts of students were carefully selected.
This strategy succeeded: vocational subjects are now sought-after. The ‘My Journey’ proposals will open up access to these subjects to a wider range of learners. It will also present a greater range of vocational and ‘applied’ subjects. The distinction between the two is not yet clear though. Nor it is clear how applied subjects that currently target learners struggling to master core skills in literacy and numeracy are going to achieve real comparability with SEC-level subjects. But these details will doubtless be worked out in the coming years.
So far, so good. In this sense ‘My Journey’ continues along the general pathway of compulsory education reform. However, the 2012 Curriculum Framework went beyond subject choice and focused on the quality of teaching and learning in each and every classroom. It presented teachers with the challenge and opportunity of differentiated teaching to students with different learning styles and interests.
On the other hand, ‘My Journey’ seems to operate on the assumption that the ‘traditional’ form of academic learning cannot be questioned or transformed. Physics, it says, is not Applied Engineering, and never the twain shall meet. It effectively lets teachers off the hook: the onus of addressing diversity in learners is shifted from the teacher’s performance and expected outcomes, to the choice of subjects by students. ‘My Journey’ seems to shift the site of ‘inclusion’ from the classroom to the career guidance office.
‘My Journey’ claims that it is not after re-introducing the “highly contested selective schooling system”. But it runs the risk of reproducing such selection within each secondary school. It follows on from a number of measures by this administration that have effectively increased segregation by academic ability between classes in State secondary schools. In this sense ‘My Journey’ is a further step away from the cardinal principle of inclusion as understood by the 2012 Curriculum Framework.
And yet government is hailing ‘My Journey’ as its centrepiece reform for inclusion and diversity in secondary schooling in the run-up to its EU Presidency in a month’s time. Indeed, the Presidency may well explain the timing of the launch of this reform, with many aspects still unclear.
So, we are faced with two different perspectives of inclusion in education, both claiming to lead to more learners achieving better results. Government will say that these perspectives are complementary; leading Maltese educationalists are questioning this. The Opposition, which has been conspicuous by its absence of late in responding to education developments, has yet to pronounce itself.
‘My Journey’ is long on rhetoric and short on detail. We need much more information on how it will work and how it will affect the quality of teaching and learning in each classroom.
Above all, we need its performance indicators, government’s own yardstick of success by which it can be accountable to the nation.