Malta’s north-south divide on education revealed in Census

Where people hail from in tiny Malta remains a major factor in determining educational attainment in what is possibly a reflection of the wider class divide between affluent towns in the north, and depressed localities and port areas in the south.

The bourgeois towns of Swieqi, Sliema, St Julian’s and ‘the three villages’ of Lija, Attard and Balzan top the charts when it comes to the proportion of inhabitants aged over 15, who have attended university.

Data provided to MaltaToday by the National Office of Statistics (NSO) shows that Swieqi registers highest proportion of people who continued their education beyond secondary level (49%) and with a tertiary level of education (41%).

For those who ‘stayed in school’ beyond secondary education, Swieqi is followed by Sliema (46%), St Julian’s (45%) and the so-called ‘three villages’ namely Balzan (45%), Attard (45%) and Lija (43%).

The same order prevails for the university-educated, with Balzan (38%) overtaking St Julian’s (37%) in third place.

Of the top 10 localities for inhabitants who continued studying after secondary levbel, four are located in the north harbour region, two in the northern, and four in the western region.

In contrast seven of the localities with the lowest proportion of people with a post-secondary or tertiary education are found in the south harbour region.

Bormla (16%) emerges as the locality with the lowest proportion of people who continued their studies beyond secondary level followed by Marsa (17%), Isla (19%) and Valletta (21%).

The Census suggests that the emergence of post-secondary alternatives to university, like MCAST in the past two decades, has had a levelling effect in less affluent and younger coastal and rural rural localities.

In fact, Dingli, Mqabba and Marsaskala top the charts when it comes to the proportion of people who followed a post-secondary non university course.

But overall, the census confirms a sharp educational divide between north harbour localities, and inner harbour and southern localities which have a very low proportion of people who extending their studies beyond secondary school.

The levelling effect of MCAST

The north-south educational divide is less pronounced when it comes to the proportion of people with a post-secondary level education who did not attend university, particularly in localities with a younger population who have benefitted from the expansion of MCAST in the past two decades.

This suggests that the greater opportunities in post-secondary education beyond the traditional academic path, have benefitted less affluent localities, particularly those with a higher percentage of younger people.

Indeed the localities with the highest percentage of post-secondary education that did not complete a university degree are found in Dingli (11.2%) , Mqabba (9.8%), Marsaskala (9.7%) and Mgarr (9.7%).

Thanks to the relatively high proportion of secondary-educated respondents, Marsaskala emerges as the southern locality with the highest percentage who have continued their studies beyond secondary school (37%).

Significantly six of the 10 localities with highest proportion of post-secondary educated inhabitants who did not attend university, are found in the south eastern region.

But despite the levelling effect of MCAST and similar institutions, southern harbour localities like Valletta, Bormla, Floriana and Marsa still register the lowest percentages of people with a post -econdary education.

In Gozo, only 30% have a post-secondary (7%) or university level of education (23%). GĦarb registers the highest proportion of those with tertiary education (28%) while Gġasri registers the highest proportion with a post-secondary level (9.3%).

Census points at social mobility in southern regions

The Census shows that the percentage of post-secondary and tertiary educated persons has increased in all regions. But the increase was more pronounced in the southern harbour and south-eastern regions.

In the southern harbour region the percentage of people who have studied beyond secondary level has nearly doubled from just 13% in 2011 to 24% in 2021.

In the south-eastern region those who have continued their studies beyond secondary level have increased from 17.2% to 31% - nearly doubling in a decade.

The percentage of those with post-secondary education in this region also grew from 5.6% to 9.2% while that of those who went to university increased from to 12% to 22%.

The increase was less pronounced in the northern region, where the percentage of those who have continued their studies beyond secondary level increased by just over 50%.