Education in Malta was a site for political struggle throughout the British colonial period and right up to the 1980s. Three highlights come to mind: the Language Question that spanned the turn of the 20th century; the autonomy of the university that was in the cross-hairs of both colonial and Maltese governments; and the 1980s Church schools issue.
As a sixth former I witnessed first-hand the then Labour government’s ham-fisted attempts to impose greater equality of educational access to improve social mobility. It was a classic case of hell through good intentions. The Church schools’ struggle contributed significantly to the electoral momentum that led to the 1987 change of government.
Since then it has been a truism in Maltese politics that education should not be ‘politicised’. The history of educational policy since the 1988 Education Act has been, if not consensual, certainly a developmental one, rather than hostage to political drama as was the fate of other areas of government policy.
And yet today, lack of political drama on educational matters seems to have morphed into political quietism. I am not for the life of me advocating a return to educational sturm und drang. But I am concerned at the lack of vigorous public debate on and scrutiny of the significant educational reforms in practice or proposed since 2013.
This is not because I necessarily disagree with them, but because lack of debate invites hegemony. Both the Opposition and the Faculty of Education, who were so active in informing the public debate for the pre-2013 reforms, have been largely absent from the public arena over the last four years.
One welcome exception is the Platform for Human Rights Organisations in Malta (PHROM), that has given due importance to some educational issues in its ‘Annual Human Rights Report 2016’. The PHROM Report highlights Malta’s vertiginous drop in world rankings on the gender gap in educational attainment: from 26th in 2006 to 111th to 2016. Clearly, not all is well in our educational system. And I am not talking about the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools mess, but about the quality and outcomes of teaching and learning.
This administration has done well to increase access to childcare and bring it under the purview of education. It has targeted school absenteeism, highlighted inclusion, prioritised early school-leavers and further enhanced vocational education. It has opted to scale down the high specifications of the new secondary schools of the future planned prior to 2013, so as to ensure that the schools in use today have physical learning environments that are fit for purpose.
I am concerned at the lack of vigorous public debate on and scrutiny of the significant educational reforms in practice or proposed since 2013
But it faces a number of issues on which it needs to be challenged. Its new teacher training policies could cause significant teacher shortages. It has reintroduced colonial-era segregationist measures in schools, with no indication of their impact on learning outcomes. Other initiatives such as mixed-gender schooling and Middle Schools have no metrics by which the public can measure their effectiveness.
The momentum there was five years ago to focus on teacher flexibility and effective teaching/learning through the Learning Outcomes Framework has been dissipated. Plans for increased autonomy for individual schools (Labour has been consistent on this since 2006) seem half-baked and would leave the colleges, which would be retained, in an administrative limbo.
As with the pre-2013 administrations, this government has largely dodged the only really effective measure that would improve learner engagement, core skills and ultimately SEC results – transforming the quality of learning and teaching from 0 to 10 years.
A revamped Nationalist Party (but let’s not hold our breath) should hold government to account on such issues. It needs to take education out of the storage cupboard it was put for the last four years. It needs to develop its own bold educational vision for equity, social justice and success for all.
Let’s party as one
I get hives whenever I hear frenzied calls for party unity, melodramatic professions of love for the party, or even worse, for il-Kap. There is something profoundly wrong in referring to your party in the same way as your family, your football club or your partit tal-festa.
Politics has a name for the championing of strength through unity for the sole purpose of power and mutual personal gain, irrespective of the rightness or soundness of the raison d’être that is holding together the disparate elements. It is as old as the Roman Empire, who invented the concept of the fasces, the bundle of rods that are individually weak but when tied together cannot be broken. The political ideology that is represented by the fasces is fascism.
Incidentally, the Roman fasces incorporated an axe, symbolising the rulers’ power over life and death. Remember Chris Cardona’s mannara speech to the Labour delegates that eventually catapulted him to the deputy leadership of the party? Adrian Delia may be close to Cardona in more ways than one.