Making good schools

A few weeks ago 5,092 teenagers completed their secondary education. Statistics published in Parliament (PQ 34,382) show that this total is made up of 2,620 males and 2,472 females. Over two-thirds of young males and 71% of female secondary students attended government schools. Another 762 boys (29%) and 580 girls (23%) attended Church schools; 185 boys (7%) and 136 girls (5%) attended independent schools. It is still too early to say how many of these 5,092 16-year-olds will move on to post-secondary education.

The last available statistics are for 2000 when 40% of secondary school leavers went on to post-secondary education. This number is still very low compared to other countries that Malta has to compete with in the global economy. The end of compulsory education for the majority of our young people should serve as a moment of reflection whether schools are adequate at equipping our young people with the indispensable skills, attitudes and competences to live and work in the harsh realities of the 21st century.

What have 12, 13 years of schooling contributed to the personal and social development of these 5,092 young people who have just left school? Writing about effective schools, Robert Bollen says: "We cannot just look at the output of the black box called 'school'; we also have to measure the input into it." The input is made up of factors inside the school and outside it and all these internal and external factors interact on each other to produce a very complex reality.

Mere technicalities?

In a democratic society the party in government has to shoulder the responsibility for the quality of the educational system as a whole. The present government has been trying to shirk this responsibility by off-loading it onto the Education Division and relegating it to a matter of technicalities. As if the duty of the Education Minister is to make grand and generic statements about abstract policy while the nitty-gritty job and responsibility of educating children and young people lies squarely with teachers in the classrooms, heads of schools and Education Division officials.

This flawed position of the Education Minister makes him keep away from engaging seriously in any national debate on how our schools are performing. This position has also meant that in the last four years, instead of focusing on schools and supporting them to adopt "what works" approaches and strategies, he has indulged himself by announcing one initiative after another which usually have the lifespan of the media event where they are launched. Most of these initiatives are based on the dangerous and harmful premise that many schools are not working and their salvation lies in building remote mechanisms to intervene on schools from outside them and outside school hours.

In the last four years the Minister of Education has not bothered himself to carry out any reality checks to assess how and to what extent his abstract policies have affected what goes on every day in the classrooms. He has wasted precious time and resources on the system in general away from the core where formal education happens in classrooms and in schools. B.P.M. Creemers writes that international research shows that "the classroom level has maybe two or three times the influence on student achievement than the school level does."

Inside the classroom

We should be concentrating precisely on the area which the government has neglected in these four years: classrooms and schools. They are the focal points of change. Instead we have had a minister behaving as if teachers and heads were obstacles to formal education and as if life would be so much easier without them!

We can improve our schools only if we value the active involvement of school heads, teachers, students, parents and the wider community outside the schools. School councils have been allowed to become comatose. They must be encouraged to wake up and flourish by developing them beyond fund raising committees. Resources must be devoted to the schools and classrooms.

Staff development must be school-based and school development plans must become the major instruments for the formulation and implementation of educational policy and practice. The Education Ministry and Division must be there primarily to create and sustain conditions favourable to the continuous improvement of the teaching-learning process that goes on in classrooms with the vision of the best quality education for all where children and young people come first.

So far exam results are the main tool that our education system has produced to measure the students' performance. The same tool can be used to measure the schools' and the system's performance.

Information tabled in Parliament (PQ 34,383) shows that 27% of our male and 16% of our female school leavers did not even sit for any Secondary Education Certificate (SEC) exams. These exams are at present the sole academic certification and validation form of assessment of the Maltese educational system.

The results for the May session show that students' performance (Grade 1 to 5) vary from the abysmal government area secondary schools for boys to the high fliers of boys and girls attending Church schools. Only 10% of students leaving area secondary schools obtained a pass in the Maltese Sec exam. Only 4% passed in English, 3% in Maths, 5% in Physics and 1% in Computer Studies,with boys finishing at the bottom of the heap, even lower than the girls attending area government schools. The corresponding pass rate for Church schools was: 84% in Maltese, 89% in English, 85% in Maths, 72% in Physics and 51% in Computer Studies.

The junior lyceums come in second place with pass rates of 71% in Maltese, 69% in English, 62% in Maths, 63% in Physics and 16% in Computer Studies. Independent schools finish in third place with pass rates of 35% in Maltese, 67% in English, 46% in Maths, 38% in Physics and 12% in Computer Studies. A glance at these results is enough to tell us how misleading and mistaken is the simplistic "government is bad, private is good" notion so often present in discourse about our education system.

Ownership is no guarantee of success or failure. We should be concentrating all our energies and resources on developing the characteristics of good schools and working on specific action plans to make schools good schools for the sake of our children and young people.