Learning to succeed

In the last four years the government has taken no new initiatives to train more educational psychologists and to increase the number of people who work at the Specific Learning Difficulties Centre (SPLD) at Floriana. This lack of qualified personnel is threatening the quality of education provided by the schools. A few months ago the Nationalist government launched yet another document about inclusive education. Many of its objectives cannot be reached as the required personnel and resources are lacking.

In its two-year term in office the last Labour government had taken concrete steps to start for the first time ever a Master's course in psychology at the University of Malta.

The five young people who graduated are now trying to cope with looking after the needs of 70,000 students in local schools. In the last four years, no more post-graduate courses were organised and the School Psychological Service still needs another five to seven educational psychologists to enable it to provide a good quality service to students.

The Labour government had also started taking steps to commit new resources at the SPLD. The centre is made up of three persons and they find it impossible to cope with around 7,000 students with dyslexia. In the last four years, no new initiatives have been taken to train new personnel to help students and schools handle dyslexia.

The next Labour government is committed to train more teachers, facilitators and professional staff to support students with disabilities and with learning difficulties. We do not have the required trained personnel to give a high quality service to these children and that is why only a handful of them advance beyond secondary school in their education. No new initiatives have been taken to provide education and training for disabled 16- year-old youngsters.

The Nationalist government has conducted a bloated propaganda campaign boasting of the millions of liri it is spending on education. No money has been spent to equip the School Psychological Services and the SPLD with the necessary personnel and resources to help the thousands of dyslexic children who are falling behind in our schools. No money has been spent on training more personnel to help them educate hearing impaired children. No money has been spent on providing specialised courses for facilitators taking care of autistic children.

The list goes on and on. It is not enough to boast of the millions of liri spent on education. The money must go to improve the quality of the educational service to our children and young people to enable them to succeed in life.

More children must succeed in our schools. Those who are already succeeding must learn to succeed differently - in a way which is appropriate for today. We can never be complacent about our education system. We must strive to improve it and make sure that our children and youngsters are doing well when compared to others in other countries competing with us for investment and markets.

Late last year the United Nations' Agency for Children - Unicef - published a report on the education systems of the world's 24 richest countries. The research was compiled by the Unicef Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy. The research is based on international surveys carried out by the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) and the Trends in International Math and Science Study (Timss).

These surveys set out to determine the abilities of 15-year olds in reading, math, technology and science - and more important than that, it measured how knowledge in these areas built the ability of youngsters to solve problems in the real world. The surveys explore what constitute effective schools and the kind of home support needed by students to succeed at school.

Malta has never participated in these studies and so we are not in a position to know where our education system is when compared to other countries. We must start participating in these surveys if we want to ensure that our children and young people do not fall behind in today's and tomorrow's world where investment moves to countries with a highly skilled workforce.

The next Labour government will take the necessary steps to enable our country to take part in international surveys to help us set benchmarks for our system to beat our in-built insularity, and set targets for our children and youngsters, within the context of the skills they need, to be able to compete successfully with children and youngsters growing up in other countries and competing with us for investment and markets.

The next Labour government will be setting up a fund of Lm1.5 million to open up more our education system to the rest of the world. This fund will go to support Maltese and Gozitan students who want to follow courses (on site or through distance learning) by universities in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Japan to study in universities and other learning institutions.

Malta must globalise its education system if we are to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Mr Bartolo is Labour spokes-man on education