Students who did not sit for their O level exams are being encouraged to join educational programmes to gain skills that would help them get a job.
Education Minister Dolores Cristina said that over the past few weeks such students were contacted and offered help to carry on with their studies.
The step comes in the wake of a reply to a parliamentary question that showed 455 Form 5 students in government schools decided against taking their O levels this year.
Of these, 278 were boys.
The highest number from any one school, 57, came from the girls’ secondary in Ħamrun. Another 10 students in Church schools and three in private schools did not sit for exams.
Ms Cristina said 4,908 fifth formers from Church, state and independent schools took their O levels this year.
On average, each student sat for seven subjects. There were also 2,387 private individuals, either retaking exams or mature students, who sat for the exams.
The full cohort of fifth formers included 76 students who have been formally assessed and diagnosed as being intellectually or physically disabled. Malta has the highest rate of inclusion of disabled students in mainstream schools in the EU.
Ms Cristina felt there were a number of reasons why students opted out of exams.
These include learning difficulties, low self-esteem and lack of motivation, not only on the part of the student but also emanating from their family background.
“Sometimes it is the urge or the need to go to work. Money in hand and the independence that this brings with it is an attraction to many young people.”
The college system, Ms Cristina said, was already contributing towards a decrease in exam-takers.
“One of the reasons that led to demotivation was definitely the selective system, where students were set apart according to their level of abilities from an early age, then moving to different schools running on two different streams,” she said.
The Labour spokesman on education, Evarist Bartolo ,felt that a superficial overview of the figures showed the problem of educational failure was not solely concentrated in socially disadvantaged areas.
“Children like these 455 who are allowed to fall behind are being deprived of their human rights,” he said.
“All the young people who come out of school unskilled and unqualified are the result of an unjust system that reinforces social inequality and economic waste.”
He added that secondary schools had to be made more relevant and meaningful for adolescents.
“We need to change what we teach and how we teach it. We need to find ways of educating these young people and not simply give them a new school-leaving certificate.
“Our schools must help them learn how to learn, how to discover knowledge and how to do what they have learned: to learn by doing and to improve what they do by learning. We must heal the deep split that has always existed in our education system; the chasm between the vocational and academic streams.”