While the latest public debate on the educational system is focused on the quality of political governance, emerging information on the effectiveness of schools should give rise to some serious soul searching by policymakers. Education has a key role in determining how you spend your adult life.
Two sets of information reveal the major challenges the country faces in upgrading effectiveness and equity in our educational system. Education Minister Evarist Bartolo gave a multitude of statistical evidence showing that hundreds of pupils, especially those coming from migrant families, leave primary school unable to read and write in English. Their basic skills in maths and science presumably are just as deficient.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has just published a report on the performance in science, reading and mathematics of 15-year-olds in various countries. After a period of non-participation in this important exercise, in 2015, Maltese students submitted themselves to the tests that measure achievement levels.
Malta was ranked in the lowest of three grades in the category described as “countries with a mean performance below OECD average”. Sadly, we are certainly not among the best in the European Union where it comes to educational achievement of our young students.
The socio-economic long-term consequences of low achievement in both primary and secondary education are increasing inequity in education with a higher economic cost incurred for health, income support, child welfare and social security systems.
The OECD defines equity in education as having two dimensions.
The first is fairness, which simply means making sure that personal and social circumstances, like socio-economic status, should not be an obstacle to achieving educational potential. The second element is inclusion, ensuring a minimum standard of education for all; for example, everyone should be able to read, write and do simple arithmetic.
Both of these elements of equity are crucially important to overcome the effects of social deprivation that often causes school failures. There are far too many students leaving the educational system without basic skills for work and life in the knowledge economy of the start of this millennium.
We do not need any further evidence about the symptoms of our underperforming educational system.
Neither do we require more high-level strategic plans that sound inspirational on a first reading but that, more often than not, fail to improve the effectiveness of our educational system because of poor implementation.
One step to improving performance and preventing dropout is to identify as early as possible students who are most vulnerable and then proceed to take action quickly. This cannot be achieved if educators are not motivated and better compensated for monitoring information on attendance, performance and involvement in school activities.
It is encouraging that more investment is being made in vocational education because, in today’s knowledge economy, one shot at achieving skills that makes one employable is not enough. But this calls for added resources not necessarily in the form of building more schools but motivating, training and retraining teachers to face the new realities that we are experiencing, especially as a result of the inflow of migrants who struggle to communicate in our official languages.
The key success factor to promote more equity in education is for policymakers to decide to invest in early childhood education and care with strong parental involvement.