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9 NEWS maltatoday | SUNDAY • 15 SEPTEMBER 2024 KARL AZZOPARDI kazzopardi@mediatoday.com.mt Maltese schooling education Government decision to subsidise private education receives mixed bag of reactions EXPERTS in the education sector disagree on whether government's move to subsidise private schools is the "right decision" or whether it is a "half-baked measure." MaltaToday reached out to former education minister Evarist Bartolo and former head of school and ADPD education spokesperson Mario Mallia to gauge their views on a government decision to fork out €27 million in subsidies that will prevent signifi- cant increases for independent school fees. This investment, amounting to €26,875,940, fol- lows concerns raised by Independent Schools Asso- ciation about significant increases in fees that par- ents with children in private schools were expected to face at the start of the upcoming school year. The increase would have been prompted by wage hikes for educators to bring them on par with improved pay packages for State and church school teachers agreed in the summer. Education minister Clifton Grima has defended the move, saying increases of more than 24% in fees could have been expected, and there was also the danger of some schools closing down. The education minister further noted that the subsidies were aimed at preventing the likelihood of students who are forced to switch over to public schools in the middle of their educational journey. The decision was criticised in several Labour cir- cles for being unsocialist but former education min- ister Evarist Bartolo agreed with government, saying there was no alternative. "The money is going into educators' pockets and not the institution's owners. It will also help private schools to give teachers the same pay package as those of church schools. It was either coming out of the state's or parents' pockets," he said. "The mon- ey is not being taken away from state schools, but government has increased its budget for the sector, which is always a positive." He also said that faced with an exodus of students, government would have nowhere to place the stu- dents from independent schools into church and state schools. But Mario Mallia disagreed, saying it is govern- ment's job to ensure there is enough space for every student. "If government needs to build a school, it should build a school." Questioned whether he feels it is unfair to subsi- dise private schools, when such institutions are only accessible to those who afford it, he said "it might be, and that is why it is half-baked." Mallia went on to argue that government should go beyond the immediate concern and improve ac- cess to education. "If access is limited, through religion, like in Church schools, or through money, like in private schools, it is a problem. We must open access to every child," he said, arguing there is too much uni- formity in the schooling system. "I emphasise school ethos, and the need for a bottom-up approach, not the colonial school system already in place, with the education department barking down orders and everyone has to do as they are told, but rather hav- ing schools adapt to the needs and requirements of the students." He proposed a model like the one in Sweden, where private schools are fully funded by the state. "This makes them accessible to everyone, not just those who afford them," he said. Evarist Bartolo where "social empathy and… stu- dents' higher-order cognitive skills are promoted and nurtured." 'Flight' of the middle class The fact is that Malta's has lacked the unified educational experience of public schooling in countries like Italy or France and many oth- er EU member states. Instead, Malta's segregated school system reproduced the competitive nature of parents' ex- pectations for children. The 1980s proved to be a water- shed moment for Maltese educa- tion. State schools suffering from lower investment and educational resources, compared unfavour- ably to Church schools. When Labour attempted a ham-fisted reform at making the latter free of charge – an attempt at forcing the rightful mix of students across all schools – it led to the 1985 lock- out and strikes. But a generation of young, aspi- rational middle-class parents was scarred. By the end of that decade, par- ents' foundations started organis- ing the financing and construction of a host of private-independent schools, in the belief they were the best guarantors of their children's education – not the State. Today, it is the State that is in- tervening to allow these parents to retain their free choice to deter- mine their children's schooling. For it is safe to say that the cost of private education is a burdensome weight on middle-class pockets, cutting into normal spending hab- its. For the less-than-wealthy who chose private schools because they refuse to send children to a state school, the question is: is the be- lief that the state school system is inferior, that justified such a costly endeavour? Parents who value the ethos of Church schools will hope for a lucky break in the annual lottery that assigns a limited number of places to new entrants. The 1991 concordat engineered by the Nationalist administration swapped Church lands for a deal to pay Church schoolteachers' salaries, which somewhat makes them public schools of a different kind. Their enduring ethos keeps attracting the attention of parents motivated about ensuring the best education for their children, a fac- tor that also affects the mix of chil- dren in the non-State sector. The PISA results of 2016, carried out by Prof. Carmel Borg, revealed an interesting facet about parental cultural capital: students whose mother had a tertiary education qualification were 59 percentile points more likely to access high- er education provision than their counterparts whose mother held a primary to lower secondary qualification. Similar results (54 percentile points) were obtained when access to higher education was correlated with the father's educational background. Prof. Borg wrote in 2018 in Isle- softheleft.com that the socio-eco- nomic gap that characterises the end of compulsory education gets carried forward: adults from low socio-economic backgrounds who emerge from compulsory educa- tion with low levels of education, end up registering much lower take-up of formal adult education provision, and are likely to be early school-leavers. "While recognising that the rea- sons for underachievement in ed- ucation are multiple and complex and include personal and familial dysfunctionality, the above statisti- cal indications suggest that the im- pact of social injustices, intimately tied to social, economic, fiscal, cul- tural, and educational policies, is strong," Prof. Borg wrote. These differences are clearly mapped out in the PISA results. Church and private school boys and girls score higher in science than the international average, and reading scores are better for private schools than church, and in turn significantly higher. These results reflect what Prof. Borg calls "the flight of the middle-class to the non-state sector", which leave state schools suffering from a so- cial mix with a concentration of the gravest social, emotional and behavioural challenges within the state provision. "Such 'flight' has also created a differentiated habitus where so- cial class distinctions and class- based differences in educational performance, linked to economic, social and cultural capital, are re- produced."