The emphasis on the adoption of hands-on approaches does not mean that the academic aspect of VET is unimportant.

The teaching of vocational education (VET) at secon­dary school level in Malta is a move in the right direction educationally, not only because it aligns Malta with Europe but also because it offers learners a wider choice of school subjects – as well as opening the doors to them to certain occupational destinations that they perhaps may not otherwise have considered.

Both in Malta and Europe-wide, a lot of changes have been taking place in the VET sector, particularly in the last two decades; and it is important for teachers to keep abreast of developing changes if what they are teaching is to remain current. A pertinent question for Malta is how best to go about training candidate teachers at the University of Malta so as to enable them to teach VET subjects effectively, particularly in the local context.

One way of answering this question is to explore what candidate teachers have to say about this. From this perspective, I refer to my personal experience of training candidate teachers who were specialising in (the teaching of) Design and Technology at the University of Malta around two years ago.

Candidate teachers were split into small tutorial groups (school experience tutorial groups) in order to reflect on the school observations they were carrying out. The school observations marked an important transition in the candidate teachers’ lives, where, instead of seeing schools from a student’s perspective, as they had done throughout their school years, they now saw schools from a teacher’s perspective, for the first time in their life.

At the end of the academic year, once they had completed all their tutorials, all the candidate teachers were asked to team up with all the others in their respective tutorial group and present what they considered as significant aspects of their school experience to their peers.

The candidate teachers in my tutorial group firstly re-enacted a badly managed workshop session. Then, they re-enacted a well-managed workshop session.

The candidate teachers elicited three distinguishing factors bet­ween a poorly managed and a well-managed workshop. These were: (i) the way the lesson was structured and delivered – did the lesson enable the learners to be engaged? (ii) the way the teacher attended to health and safety requirements – was the teacher attentive to all that went on in the class/workshop? and (iii) the way the teacher related the material used in the class/workshop to other school subjects and to what is going on in the wider world – was the teacher informed, updated and employing a holistic approach to teaching? I would say that these three points are applicable to how the effective teaching of VET in Maltese secondary schools needs to be approached.

Complementing these points is that at a curriculum design level, it is important for teachers to have learning outcomes in place that lend themselves to the incorporation of some form of hands-on activity. In this way, learners can say how what they are learning is applicable to real-life situations, and also be able to reflect on what they have learnt; in order to further enhance it, or improve on it, in practical ways.

This emphasis on the adoption of hands-on approaches does not mean that the academic aspect of VET is unimportant. Historically, this ‘mentality’ was somewhat commonplace in Malta in the trade schools that started operating in the 1970s. Since the trade schools of that time provided, more often than not, what today would be widely considered as second opportunity schooling, they are highly distinct from the VET provision of today. Academic input was kept to a minimum at the trade schools, and barely extended to over 25 per cent of the overall curriculum offered.

Having said this, some students chose to attend trade schools because they wanted to take up occupations in such fields as carpentry, welding or automobile repairs, and not because they wanted to avoid academic subjects, as is sometimes popularly believed. They saw that the curriculum offered at trade schools was more likely to lead them to their occupation of choice than the curricula offered at other schools.

The lessons in VET in our schools should be ‘good fun’ and excite learners to want to learn more about what they have covered at school

The trade schools were closed down by the 1990s because it was increasingly recognised that a general education, rather than a specialised one, was more beneficial to secondary school aged learners. Moreover, the idea of a job for life, which had prevailed in previous generations, was now rapidly disappearing, if it had not, by then, disappeared almost altogether, at least in private industries, in Malta.

I believe that it is also important to mention that, in the 1970s, technical institutes were also set up. Many of these institutes can be said to be still operating today in some way or another since they were eventually absorbed into the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (Mcast), which start­ed admitting its first learners in 2001. Having said this, today, Mcast has expanded beyond all recognition in terms of its infrastructure, learner population and also the number of courses at different levels on offer, in comparison to the early 2000s.

The Institute of Tourism Studies (ITS) is also a leading provi­der of VET in Malta and is dedicated to training people for work in the hospitality industry.

When discussing the training of candidate teachers at the University of Malta, a major concern that I have is that ITS and Mcast (and the technical institutes that Mcast has absorbed) have given vocational education in Malta a ‘post-secondary school education’ character that has come to be associated with sector-specific training. However, seeing VET simply in terms of preparation for the labour market offers a limited construction for teachers of VET subjects in secondary schools, particu­larly since they are not teaching adults. It is likely that since there has not been any prior educational provision of VET to under-16s, teachers will be faced with this sector-specific and work-oriented mindset by learners, by professionals and by the local industry.

For this reason, I would like to conclude by recommending that candidate teachers at the University of Malta develop an operational meta-concept by thinking through how they can contribute to deve­loping vocational education in such a way that it does not remain so tightly linked to the focus on occupational sectors as it has been throughout its historical foundations in the Maltese context.

Rather, I propose that VET in schools is seen as a medium that (i) contributes to the holistic development of learners; (ii) is linked to other activities that are going on at school; (iii) is age-appropriate for younger learners and, I would say last but certainly not least (iv) is both designed and delivered in a way that makes what learners take with them from their VET lessons appealing, so that they would like to build upon them further even if they do not take up a VET oriented career.

The lessons in VET in our schools should be ‘good fun’ and excite learners to want to learn more about what they have covered at school, when they are at home, engaged in online interactions, and when they are in other informal settings.

The path ahead for Malta is certainly an interesting and exciting one.

Damian Spiteri Ph.D., PG Cert VET, is an experienced lecturer in vocational education and training (VET) and has also written extensively about VET in Malta in academic journals.