Because we are officially a bilingual society, Maltese and English are taught in our schools as if they were two native languages that our children acquired automatically through schooling and socialisation.

But thousands of Maltese children are being brought up in families and educated in schools where English is not used regularly. We also have thousands of children whose first language at home, in the school and in their community, is not Maltese.

But we have a one-size-fits-all language policy for all our children and schools. As this policy ignores our reality, it has not worked and is still not working.

On average, only 56 per cent of our students walk away with passes in the Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) in English language and Maltese. This failure to achieve competence and proficiency in English and Maltese also explains why only 60 per cent of our students are continuing to study after the age of 16.

At least 44 per cent of our fifth formers still do not manage to become competent in English language and Maltese after 12 years of schooling, and without a good grasp of these languages, their whole educational achievement is threatened.

SEC and Junior Lyceum examiners still refer to poor spelling, weak grasp of grammar and syntax, poor reading habits and lack of imagination and creativity in their reports on students’ performance in English language and Maltese SEC and Junior Lyceum examinations.

To change all this, we need to design appropriate curricula, examinations, syllabi, content and pedagogical methods in the teaching and learning of English and Maltese.

The Maltese SEC and Matsec examination needs to be split into two different papers: language and literature. Our students should be given the option to choose one of these papers and a pass in the Maltese language SEC and Matsec exam should be enough to qualify them for a course at the University of Malta.

Steps should be taken to modernise the teaching of Maltese and choose content that is more relevant to the young people being schooled now. Forcing thousands of our teenagers to cover a Maltese SEC syllabus that is closer to a pre-industrial Malta 80 years ago than to their daily lives makes them hate Maltese literature and gives them the sensation that Maltese is a strange and remote language.

We have very good contemporary writers who are creating literature that is very relevant for young people growing up today. However, this literature is being kept away from our schools.

Teaching material and methods have been developed to help foreigners learn Maltese but our schools do not make any use of these experiences. The same goes for the teaching of English, where the success we have achieved in teaching the language to over a million foreigners has not been transferred to our schools to teach our own youngsters.

We should use the know-how and experience we have built in the sector of the teaching of English as a foreign language to improve the teaching of Maltese and English in our primary and secondary schools.