Malta’s education system boasts access, but weak in 'success' – Bartolo

Evarist Bartolo referred to a recent European Union monitoring report on the achievement of benchmarks in education which revealed that Malta’s early school leaver rate stands at 37%, almost double the EU average rate of 18%.

“This is a terrible waste of Malta’s human resource,” Bartolo said, adding that according to the EU Commission itself, government’s plans to address early school leavers “are not ambitious enough.”

He said that while Malta’s education system boasts very good accessibility at kindergarten, primary, and secondary levels, there is not enough emphasis on “success” and quality education.

“Access is only the first step. The system also needs success, which needs a lot of work in this regard," Bartolo said.

The Labour MP said that kindergarten, primary, and secondary levels especially need to ensure a quality education for students which will see them through to the tertiary levels.

Citing one example, he said that science subjects need more attention as primary levels referring to “inadequate” pass rates in Maths, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.

He said what the Labour party is particularly concerned with is how countries that spend as much as Malta (6% of the GDP) are performing better than Malta, citing countries like Latvia and Poland. He said among countries that spend 6% of the GDP in education, only Bahrain under-performs Malta.

“It is worrying how these countries are spending as much as us, yet achieving better results,” Bartolo said.

He however said that while Malta cannot afford to spend less on education, what was being spent had to go to the right places, and called for a review of the primary and secondary educational levels in this regard. “We definitely cannot spend less,” he emphasised, pointing out that countries like Finland, the leading country in education worldwide, spend as much as between €5,850 and €6,600 on each individual student.

Malta spends roughly half of that amount per student, he pointed out.

Asked about concrete proposals to improve the education system, Bartolo said that the Labour party will be taking an active role in debating the upcoming National Curriculum “to address its weaknesses, determine how it can be developed, and areas which were not addressed.”

He said the Labour party would be making its recommendations to improve the curriculum and make recommendations to implement the changes into concrete measures.

He said Labour would push for greater importance on science subjects at primary levels, and pointed out that the national curriculum makes no reference to the contentious issue of language of instruction at either primary or secondary level.

Bartolo said that English as learning language can be given greater prominence without detracting from the importance of Maltese, adding that Maltese was important for both national and cultural identity, as well as child cognitive development.

Bartolo also reiterated the PL’s call for government to publish the latest benchmarking examination results, calling for an overall review of the results to determine whether the results being achieved are positive or not. He said that given the Junior Lyceum exam results used to be published without fail, “this is nothing out of the ordinary.”

Fellow Labour spokesperson Owen Bonnici said that according to a report published by the World Economic Forum, Malta is slipping behind in education and has even lost a rank in its overall competitiveness ranking.

He accused government of playing with figures by citing SEC results as being positive when it was including low exam results of 5 and 6 as passes and also excluding students who did not sit for their exams.