Top priority: a future for thousands of young people left by the wayside

While acknowledging this the document does not explain why every year 2000 young men and women (40% of our Fifth Formers) walk away from compulsory schooling without acquiring the competencies in Maltese. English and Mathematics needed to continue successfully in education. Access to higher and further education is not being denied due to financial constraints but because of the poor learning outcomes of primary and secondary schools.

The document has no plan to address the major problems we have in state secondary education. In area secondary schools more than 90% of our young people and a third of our junior lyceum male students leave secondary school without obtaining the necessary grades in the main subjects of the SEC exams that enable them to continue studying successfully in a vocational or academic post-secondary course. 

All the document says about these thousands of young people is that they should be given a “second-chance education where possible.” This is certainly not going to be done by any quick fix courses like those the Foundation for Educational Services intends to offer from October 2010. These courses will fix the statistics by showing a higher number of young people in education but they will not help to turn around the lives of these young people.

To succeed, second chance education needs to be planned well, the courses must be innovative and imaginative and relevant for young people who hate formal schooling because of the negative experience they have had at school. The courses have to be based on experiential learning, using modern communications technology and having teachers who have been trained well to understand the world of these young people and treat them as adults and equal partners in the learning process.

While it should be one of the top priorities to provide second chance education to those who were not reached by their first education chance, it should also be a top priority to ensure a much better childcare and kindergarten, primary and secondary education for all our children to stop having 2000 young people walk away every year from their compulsory schooling lacking the necessary skills in literacy, numeracy and science and technology that is the basic survival kit for the 21st century.

All the document says about this is: “All learners, including those who have disadvantaged backgrounds should be given the required means to achieve the skills needed. This entails investing in structures and creating programmes which safeguard these basic needs.” The document gives no indication how this is to be done. There are no action plans on how to create the best opportunities for the 20% of our students who live in poor households who together with another 20% are leaving school early. The large state secondary schools that are being created where students are being reduced to masses of anonymous numbers are certainly not the way to give these children the educational experience they need.

The document also has no proposals on how to spread science and technology education in primary schools so that we will start having more than 20% students taking up science subjects like biology and chemistry. Without more students taking science subjects we will never build the modern economy we need for the 21st century.