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

The top priority of the Pre-Budget Document for 2011 in education should be “reducing the number of early school-leavers”.

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.

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A second chance in Malta usually means choosing politics as a way to go forward in life. That explains why there are so many incompetent people in power or in positions of influence. Therefore an opportunity to impart real skills to the Maltese population would be commendable. To succeed, we need to eliminate the culture that playing a sycophant to politicians or quite simply being the politician is the only (and the easy) way forward. As long as that easy option exists - why bother to make an effort. A more fundamental issue is one of accountability and respect for principles. In our culture there is no accountability - we are used to seeing people who should be held accountable getting away with the worst corruption and behavior. What's more, for a christian nation, we are in fact a people without the notion of principles, ethics or morality and while we may distinguish between right and wrong, no body is willing to stand up for what is right. Instead we choose to scurry around like rats, trying to ingratiate ourselves with people who have corrupted our values and our country. In such a culture, people with no scruples are emboldened to take on roles for which they are not qualified - feeling that this is no longer necessary. Finally, one must hope that a second chance at education will not end up cheapening the value of other hard earned qualifications. What also comes to mind is the disgraceful scandal of having teachers being ordered to fix the grades of their students to pretend that so many of them had successfully completed their studies. The current administration lacks the credibility or moral values to seriously tackle this problem. Finally, parents are not stupid. They will continue to advise their children to choose carriers as lawyers, accountants, architects and similar professions as these are the dominant professions in Malta despite the demands of the 21st century. Even 'leading' ICT firms in Malta are lead by lawyers and people without science and technology qualifications - further proof that being qualified for a job has no value in our culture and in the realities of the political situation we are in.