Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1526669
8 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 SEPTEMBER 2024 MATTHEW VELLA mvella@mediatoday.com.mt Unspoken truth about Maltese is its worship of segregated education IT is no secret that Malta's three- tier system of schooling – State, Church, and private-independent schools – reflects longstanding underlying class and gender issues, and notions of the implied prestige of non-State school. But the reforms of the last dec- ades for a more inclusive educa- tional pathway for all students, have many times been pushed back by conservative educators and parents – there is no question that Maltese schooling has reflect- ed similar divisions in class and the inequalities of Maltese society. A €27 million government sub- sidy to fee-paying private schools, to keep their hefty fees from rising further, raises questions as to how fair such 'subsidies' to wealthi- er parents are, and whether they privilege Malta's segregated edu- cation system instead of pursuing equitable educational systems. Is it right that the financial trou- bles of the schools where parents choose to pay in the hope of bet- ter educational outcomes for their children, get socialised and bailed by taxpayers' cash? After all, these parents even get tax refunds for the implied 'burden' of paying for their children's education. Certainly enough, schools and society are often a mirror reflec- tion of each other. From common entrance to benchmarking For many years, it was common for Church school students to outperform their peers in SEC ex- ams. The implied prestige of these schools created a demand for mo- tivated parents to have children sit for common entrance exams that promoted higher-performing students to a Church secondary school or a government Junior Lyceum. It allowed mainly non- State schools to cream off the best performing students of the island, albeit having garnered a reputa- tion for a supportive, educational experience. The 2011 phase-out of the com- mon entrance exam was a chal- lenge to those who believed this division between exam-ranked pupils reflected a natural order of life. 10-year-olds in their last primary school year could take a common entrance exam that would pro- mote them either to the govern- ment Junior Lyceum for higher performers, or into a Church sec- ondary school. Those who did not take the com- mon entrance, or did not make the grade, would continue to their town's secondary school, and fur- ther streamed into an A section or a B section. Those who could pay, might have borne the hefty costs of a private school education. The fixation with exam-mandat- ed excellence certainly dogged the Maltese educational system: par- ents assumed this formalised path- way of excellence, conditioned their child's progress towards a rewarding or safe career. And it was a system that streamed kids early on in life, determining a different quality of education and even expectations for life – you could profile students depending on which school they went to. Church schools benefited from prestige and a strong middle-class catchment – it was assumed that here were future leaders and uni- versity graduates who could ace exams and clinch sporting glory, whilst industrialised urban towns took in the children of work- ing-class families. But by 2011, when the common entrance and Junior Lyceum ex- ams started being phased out, Malta's drop-out rate for those who did not continue school after secondary level was still a massive 36.8%. Clearly, standardised tests were also punishing the desire for further education. Removing the Junior Lyceum ex- am meant channelling all 10-year- olds towards one regional second college. Gone was the streaming structure of area secondaries. In- stead "benchmarked" students would be gently bifurcated only on the subjects of maths, Maltese and English – the operational word was 'setting', and teachers had to handle both sets within the same class. Easier said than done. The common entrance and Junior Lyceum exams were a rite of passage that invited excessive stress on students, teachers and parents, learning useless informa- tion by rote and private tuition for written exercises. It was a high- stakes selection of pupils, that flew in the face of research that pro- moted an inclusive and equitable education system. Yet parents still worried that the end to this 'elit- ist' promotion, would lower their children's achievements by having them blended in a class with lower performers. Ten years later, school exams are now being gradually diluted, with a substantial percentage of a child's final result based on school-based assessment. "Standardised tests rarely ad- dress the range of abilities, learn- ing styles and patterns, intelligenc- es and learning difficulties. They tend to reinforce the one-size-fits- all pedagogical culture rather than challenge it," Prof. Carmel Borg, of the University of Malta's Faculty of Education, had told MaltaToday in 2011. He knew well the fatalistic vision of those who saw academic failure as "natural, personal and inevita- ble" – the symbolic reflection of a society defined by winners and los- ers, rich and poor, and a bourgeois aspiration of translating academic excellence into status and wealth. "They also fail to capture stu- dents' dreams, imagination, the search for beauty and alternative worlds and possibilities, risk-tak- ing, creativity, innovation and critical thinking. Moreover, they tend to breed student and privi- lege narrow curricula," – words which today illustrate the idealistic possibility of what a general educa- tion experience could be like, one Outsourcing/ Temporary Licence Natán Jáñez Carro declares the inten4on for the company to register for an Employment Agency License in accordance to L.N. 270 of 2023 EMPLOYMENT AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS ACT (CAP.452) Employment Agencies Regula4ons, 2023. The ac4vi4es proposed to be carried out focus on the provision of workers with a view to making them available to a third party including: 1. Temporary work services involve providing workers to a third party. 2. The third party assigns tasks to the temporary workers. 3. Outsourcing services involve providing workers to a third party. 4. The outsourcing agency, including contractors and subcontractors, supervises, directs, and controls the workers. Official Registered Address: 40, Santa Marija Sliema, Malta. 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