The sudden cascade of not one but three Education bills to replace the current Education (Amendments) Act of 2006 vintage has taken many people by surprise. However, that the minister, Evarist Bartolo, wishes to leave his legislative legacy as so many of his predecessors is par for the course. Nor is it surprising that the government has opted to replace the 2006 Act by three bills; the Opposition at the time had commented on the piecemeal nature of the 2006 amendments.
All three bills deserve minute consideration, although I will only touch on one here. They are set to change the direction and quality of educational management and provision for years to come. The one that has raised most ire is the Bill to regulate the education professions. First of all, the scare that it will force current teachers to re-apply for their warrants is a canard. An attentive reading of the whole offending article in the English version (which, as often happens in Malta, was probably written first) clearly indicates that it is referring to the replacement of the old Education Act with the new one, not the invalidation of extant warrants. The 2006 Act had similar, if less clunky, language.
Unfortunately, this scare may well divert attention from two key worrying aspects of this bill. The first relates to the composition of the Council. This has been increased from 13 to 16, to accommodate other training providers apart from the Faculty of Education, as well as the representatives of Kindergarten Assistants (KGAs) and Learning Support Educators (LSEs). The latter can at first glance be seen as a good move since it provides for the registration and regulation of allied educators, but it is not without its potential pitfalls.
In the medical field, the Medical Council is separate from the Council for Allied Heathcare Professionals. It is understandable that given the more egalitarian nature of the educational milieu, a single council was the preferred option. However, it will need to exercise great self-discipline to ensure that expectations for each type of service is fit for purpose and that, if anything, the Council’s high standards lead to greater professionalisation for all.
In principle, the inclusion of a representative from Mcast and from the Institute for Education (IfE), both State-run entities, are praiseworthy. After all, Mcast trains KGAs and the IfE provides continuous professional development, although it is now venturing into pre-service training. The problem is that this has been done at the expense of halving the representation of the Faculty of Education. On its 40th anniversary of service, having trained the majority of teachers in our schools and with some world-class lecturers in its ranks, the voting power of the Faculty has been reduced from 15 per cent to six per cent.
Let’s hope Minister Bartolo will not remain blinded by hubris. Otherwise this Bill will be his sad legacy to teachers
By comparison, the number of representatives of the MUT was not reduced due to the new KGA and LSE representatives. The MUT would have blown a gaskit. So why did the minister choose to slash the representation of the Faculty on the Council? What message does this give? The other, more serious, problem is that the bill has been shorn of the articles previously in place that established minimum requirements for the granting of warrants to teachers. Nor does it have similar requirements for the granting of licences to KGAs and LSEs. This is not an oversight; it is not the first piece of post-2013 legislation that is legally undernourished and leaves wide discretionary powers to a quango without parliamentary oversight.
Although the government nominally does not have majority representation on the council, in practice the sorry history of emasculation of ‘independent’ regulatory authorities in other areas of governance since 2013 does not augur well for the capacity of this council to do the right thing and maintain minimum standards. The pressures to come up with ad hoc solutions ‘għax lil dak nafuh’ (because he’s one of us) could well be overwhelming.
What is likely to happen is that the Faculty of Education, Mcast and the IfE will jostle to get ‘their’ provision approved for warranting, and this is not likely to be a race to the top. Recently the government even shed the IfE of its board of independent experts, and it is now run directly by the ministry. There are already a lot of concerns about the quality of its new pre-service Master’s programme, that is competing with the faculty’s Master’s in Teaching and Learning that recently replaced the B.Ed. In this context, reducing the faculty’s clout on the Council is even more ominous.
With this bill, government is not primarily protecting the teaching profession but giving itself licence to cut corners as it deems fit. The Council as proposed is not a recipe for greater quality in the profession, but for its decline. Let’s hope Minister Bartolo will not remain blinded by hubris. Otherwise this Bill will be his sad legacy to teachers.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece