The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many of the normal patterns and behaviours of life. There has been much talk of the impact on business, tourism, health services and cultural life. One of its key disruptions has been to education and to the overall well-being and development of young people.

Now, some 20 months later, a new school year has begun but more than 100 million students globally will not be returning to education. The world is facing what has been described by the World Bank as “the worst crisis to education and learning in a century”. Internationally, some 1.5 billion students were out of school or university at the start of this year.

In responding to such realities, governments across the world need to urgently assess the impact of the pandemic on education and design and implement policies and interventions that engage with such impact. 

Malta needs to address its obligations in this regard as a signatory to the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and to enshrine these rights in domestic law as well as in the delivery of education. The education act, first passed into law in 1988, gives legal force to the right to education for children in Malta.

Following a period of amendment and updating, begun in 2014, the new education act is set to come into force in October and offers the government the opportunity to tackle many outstanding issues including those presented by the pandemic.

While the UN convention lays out the minimum standards that ratifying states should never fall short of, Malta needs to go beyond such minimum standards. This agenda was directly addressed by the Office of the Commissioner for Children in its recent position paper.

While welcoming the new laws, the commissioner deemed them not to be sufficiently child-centred and lamented their failure to guarantee a quality education for children unable to attend school physically.

The paper emphasised again what education should aim to achieve in terms of the physical, mental, social and moral development of children. Above all, education should reinforce many of the key overarching rights of the convention including the right not to be discriminated against in the provision of education even during a pandemic.

Students in state schools appeared to have lost out as against their peers in Church and private schools when it came to going online during the pandemic, to replace the time normally spent in the classroom.

In responding to the impact of the pandemic, this reality needs to be addressed in the best interests of young people and in accordance with their rights including those of full participation. It is pivotal to ensure that future educational provision, especially as regards law and practice, is robustly child-centred.

In practical terms, this implies dealing with issues such as insufficient capacity, the provision of early education, the prohibitive costs for some families and the ongoing professional development of teachers.

As a result of the severe disruption caused to children’s education by the pandemic, education policy and strategy should now insist that schools are closed only after an effective assessment of both educational and health risks to learners and educators. Crucial also is assessing the impact of school closure on the overall well-being of students and their families.

The effective and realistic implementation of the new education act and its supporting strategies and behaviours (including its management and monitoring) will be central in any strategy to tackle growing inequality in Malta.