The Secretariat for Catholic Education and the Church Schools Association would like to state that the recently-published report by the Cambridge English Language Assessment shows that learners in Church schools at Form 4 outperform those in State schools in the writing exam and this difference is statistically significant. This is confirmed by the statistical report of the Matsec board, year after year.

The Times of Malta, on May 26, gave the impression that, according to the Cambridge report, State schools may be producing better writers than their private and Church-run counterparts. However, according to the Cambridge report, the success of State schools refers to the Year 5 cohort. The report only studied Year 5 and Form 4 learners. It insists that variations were observed within each school sector and no individual school sector was associated with a clustering of only high or only low-performing learners.

The Secretariat for Catholic Education and the Church Schools Association, which became aware of the Cambridge report through the media, is committed to study the report and its implications and take the necessary action.

Corroboration of the Year 5 results, as mentioned in the Cambridge report, can be done by comparing the results of the Year 6 English benchmark exam. The Year 6 English benchmark exam is taken a year after the Cambridge test and also has the four components of speaking, listening, reading and writing.

Although there are differences between the two exams, one can still make comparisons and distinctions.

Unfortunately, the Year 6 benchmark report does not give detailed information by school sector, probably to avoid comparison between State, Church and independent schools. We believe that Church schools do well in the benchmark exam.

The Cambridge report also notes that the Maltese education system aims at bilingualism, which prepares individuals to be equally fluent in both Maltese and English. It is well known that bilingual competence developed since childhood is different in nature from a monolingual one with languages added later. Thus, there is a difference between children growing up learning and using two languages and those using one language.

The Cambridge study only captures the English proficiency of learners at Year 5 and Form 4 as measured in alignment with the Common European Framework of Reference levels, which arenot designed to represent bilingual competence.

Further study in this area is needed to take bilingual competence into account.

Overall, the Cambridge report gives a positive impression of English proficiency by learners in Maltese schools, sheds more light on what is happening and makes several recommendations.

Further discussion of the report and its implications should lead to further development hopefully in all schools.