The Education Ministry has signed a two-year agreement with Cambridge English - a branch of the renowned Cambridge University - with the aim of improving English language proficiency in schools.

The agreement will pave the way for a benchmarking exercise from which Cambridge English would be able to get a snapshot of the level of English in schools in Malta, and draft a strategy to address areas where improvement is required.

The exercise will be carried out across the board from primary to secondary level and will also involve teacher exchanges.

In its annual report for 2014, the Matsec Board had expressed concern that 16-year-olds were leaving secondary school with a poor command of English after 10 years of schooling.

Inadequate levels of grammatical accuracy, spelling, punctuation and expression were among the shortcomings flagged by the board in a report on the performance of candidates who sat for the English Language Secondary Education Certificate in May last year.

Addressing a news conference after the signing, Evarist Bartolo said some 77,000 students came to Malta to study English last year.

The agreement, he said, had an effect of the country's competitiveness.

Hanan Khalifa, from CE, said the programme would focus on teaching methodology and assessment.

Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said the first step would be a benchmarking study to compare the local level with that abroad.

This, he said, was another milestone in Malta's quest to become an education hub. It followed the agreement on Bart University and the American University of Malta as English was crucial to attract foreign direct investment.