For decades, education has been the Cinderella of public policy priorities. Rather than conducting a soul-searching exercise to determine why the educational system is underperforming, various administrations paid lip service to the importance of improving the achievement levels of young people.
There has been no shortage of populist policies to give the impression that policymakers care about improving the education system. Student allowances are given to all students irrespective of their families’ financial means. Electronic devices are distributed free of charge to most students. And free transport is provided for children in both public and private schools.
However, what matters in education, as in many other human activities, is the results achieved. Malta continues to have some of the worst rankings in the EU for educational achievement. A root and branch reform in the way the country manages human talent is long overdue.
The Malta Chamber has made a number of recommendations to improve the performance of our education system and strengthen the dynamics of the labour market.
Perhaps its most crucial proposal is to extend the school-leaving age to 18 to ensure that more of them earn qualifications from post-secondary studies and leave school with sufficient skills to give them decent employment prospects.
This measure would make a dent in the early school-leaving phenomenon that makes Malta one of the EU’s worst performers in this metric.
But it would be naïve to think it is a silver bullet that would solve the low-achievement conundrum. Various socio-economic factors are behind the educational underachievement phenomenon. The government needs to be honest with all stakeholders, identify these factors and propose a strategy that addresses them.
The Malta Chamber is ambivalent over the hiring of more foreign workers to help the economy become more competitive and resilient. On the one hand, it wants to create personal taxation structures designed to attract rather than detract foreigners from working in Malta. But the Chamber also wants more incentives for highly qualified Maltese to return to work on the island.
The Malta Union of Teachers reacted to the Chamber’s proposals by insisting that education strategy should not be motivated merely by the need to produce workers to meet the needs of business.
Rather than get involved in the tedious tactics of blame, the business community and the teaching profession need to come together to determine why our educational system is not producing the results the country needs.
It is undeniable that the business community should be a more active stakeholder in education. However, it can only do this when it considers human capital as a resource that needs to be cultivated rather than a commodity that can be bought or discarded according to the needs of a business.
On the other side of the equation, educators must acknowledge the need to hold themselves to higher standards so as to gain more respect from the community. This means that only the better graduates should be trained as educators. These graduates need to have a strong motivation and passion for teaching. Educators must also hold themselves accountable for the results achieved.
When these conditions are satisfied, it would be time to enhance the status of educators with better working conditions, including better pay, to match their crucial role in society as the nurturers of the next generation.
A well-performing education system is the bedrock of sound economic planning and a promoter of social justice. This is why the country urgently needs to reform its talent-cultivation processes.