Heads of schools can no longer be managers if Malta’s education system is to advance – they need to be innovative and resilient leaders who are fully capable of working productively with other education professionals.
This was the salient outcome of a conference titled ‘Effective and modern school management’ organised by the Malta Union of Teachers yesterday.
Education Minister Evarist Bartolo said the government was currently performing an exercise whereby it was analysing how heads of schools spent their days, in a bid to get rid of the multiple bureaucratic layers which weighed them down.
He said that by the next scholastic year, he hoped the government would have identified the bureaucratic areas and removed them.
Mr Bartolo pointed out a series of differences between managers and leaders: a manager administers, a leader innovates. A manager also focuses on structures, while a leader focuses on people. “Unfortunately, we have rendered our heads of schools managers. EU statistics show that 40 per cent of the time spent by heads of schools is spent on managing. I suspect that in Malta’s case it’s even more than that.
“Let’s make sure that our heads of schools are able to lead, and are not hampered down by worries on infrastructure and whether the curtains are in place or whether there is enough toilet paper.
“We need to find ways of liberating our heads of schools from the administrative work and allowing them to focus on the educational part,” the minister said.
The Maltese had two main defects, the minister continued.
The first was that they preferred the traditional culture of command and control.
“Many have the attitude of ‘don’t oppose me or I’ll undermine and break you’.
“I’ve spoken with a number of heads and, in the company of others, they say that everything is proceeding smoothly. However, when I speak to them head to head, a very different story emerges.”
Hampered down by worries on infrastructure and whether the curtains are in place
The second defect was that the Maltese tended to work too much on their own, resulting in a waste of resources and energy. He then proceeded to highlight the problems plaguing the Maltese education sector.
Around 6,000 people aged between 16 and 24 are neither employed, nor in education and not even following training. Ten per cent of these are disabled.
One third of Form 5 students do not sit for their Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) exams and, if they do, do not manage to acquire at least one O level.
The minister acknowledged that SEC needed to change as it was not proving to be the best way of evaluating the skills of students.
The lack of a solid foundation which should have been built by primary and secondary schools was reflected in the number of dropouts.
Twenty-five per cent of students attending Level 1 at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology were dropouts. Levels 2 and 3 had a dropout rate of 21 and 17 per cent respectively.
Nationalist Party education spokesman Joe Cassar pointed out that teachers needed to be challenged in a productive way as following several years of teaching it was easy for a veteran teacher to slip into routine and monotony.
They needed to be helped to be creative.
Delivering the keynote space, the general secretary of the UK’s National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, stressed that capable leaders needed to be sourced and given adequate training to cope with the demands of leadership responsibilities.
Their salaries should also reflect the high level of responsibility, she added.