The English language teaching sector – which is faced with lacklustre growth in numbers and falling profits - has commissioned consultancy and advisory firm Deloitte to conduct an international analysis of Malta’s competition.

The sector – as with the cruise liner business – was, for many years, seen as complementary to ‘real’ tourism, which, for decades, meant those who sought accommodation in hotels.

This perception did not take into account a number of aspects that made the sector so vibrant and which left so many economic benefits for completely different segments, from host families to the 6,000 students who sought summer work outside the hospitality industry as teachers (of whom about 1,000 are still actively engaged).

The experience of these past years has shown that the sector punches well above its weight mainly because of the much longer stays of English language students. Whereas ‘normal’ tourists spent 7.6 days here in 2016, the duration was 20.9 days in the case of students.

That is the reason why, despite the fact that there were only 76,730 English language students last year compared to nearly two million tourists, they still constituted 8.1 per cent of total spending by visitors. This worked out to €139 million of the €1.71 billion, hardly an amount to be sneezed at.

The sector suffers from the same bottlenecks as tourism does: available seats on flights, accommodation and visas, to name but just three. One of the main challenges is to level the unequal demands for summer and the other seasons.

The Federation of English Language Teaching Organisations, Feltom, has been working hard to maintain the schools’ standards and to raise the profile of the sector. The presence of Malta Tourism Authority’s chief executive officer, Paul Bugeja, at Feltom’s recent press conference to present Deloitte’s findings about the financial performance of the sector was, therefore, encouraging. He said the tourism regulator was even planning joint missions with Feltom members to destinations that could prove of interest.

The sector has been forking out money to tap into non-EU markets, particularly those in South America and South East Asia, from where students tend to be older and stay longer.

In spite of the efforts made, the number of weeks spent by students from non-EU/EEA countries dropped by 13.6 per cent while those from the EU/EEA went up by 5.5 per cent.

Feltom very rightly flagged its concerns and has come up with ways to combat this decline. It wants the government to make it easier for them to get visas (if necessary through accredited and carefully-screened schools), for long-stay students to be allowed to work a limited number of hours and for those arriving on a tourist visa to be able to change it to a student visa without having to first leave the country.

Malta is part of the Schengen area and, therefore, it does not have a free hand. Still, that does not mean that it should not fully explore all the options, consider what other countries have done and then engage in the necessary representations with Brussels and beyond.

This is why Deloitte’s analysis will be essential in seeking ways to preserve the industry.