Today, our schools and educational institutions will have been closed for two months.

The closure of schools, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, represented an epochal challenge for all stakeholders in the education of our children. 

Parents, educators, students and administrators had to quickly adapt and switch from ‘traditional teaching’ towards new ways of providing education and learning.

In the last days and weeks, I have received countless e-mails and messages from parents, guardians and students telling me beautiful things about our educators.  

They told me real-life stories about how much teachers and LSEs went out of their way to help their students during these extraordinary times.  

At the same time, we were quick to react to constructive suggestions aimed at improving or fine-tuning this new method of education.

In a short space of time, we organised a new way to continue educating our children and we did so efficiently and expeditiously. In doing so, we received praise from leading authorities such as the Commonwealth, the Prince’s Trust and the Party of European Socialists.

Ministry officials, unions, educators, students and parents came together to organise a different way of teaching. Instead of gathering physically in a classroom, students are now learning from home with the help of digital platforms and the relentless passion and commitment of educators who adapted quickly and rose to the occasion. We took timely decisions together in a spirit of consensus-building and laid out a fair plan for every scholastic year including SEC and MATSEC exams which were shifted to September.  

While doing that, we introduced a predictive assessment mechanism for the first time for ‘O’ level students, in their own best interests.  

We set up an education helpline to assist parents and students switch to online learning and large numbers made use of the free assistance we were offering.  We set up online support to help educators teach online.  Digital learning platforms and tools have been provided and free resources made available via teleskola.mt.  Free courses were provided for parents who wanted to help their children more in their educational pathway. Klabb 3-16 went online.  

Lunches, use of free computers and internet access have been made available to children enlisted under scheme 9 and others coming from difficult backgrounds.  

We focused on school refurbishment to ensure that when students can return to schools, they will be entering cleaner, safer and better environments.

Literacy and reading programmes also shifted online.  Through cooperation with the national broadcaster, we produced a reading programme on TV and, now,  educational features also under the brand teleskolaTV. 

The list goes on and on.

Moreover, COVID-19 turned out to be a collective educational experience beyond the narrow confines of the classroom.  People have eagerly followed expert opinion, best represented by Health Superintendent Charmaine Gauci, who became a national role model as a woman and as an educator.

Thanks to this pedagogical experience, the Maltese have cooperated with the health authorities – who have all done a fantastic job - in the strategy to flatten the curve.

This is the reason why, despite the challenges for students and parents that this situation has created, we all have understood that we must do whatever it takes to keep our children safe. 

Just in the space of eight weeks, we have learned many valuable lessons. We absolutely cannot afford to throw to the wind all that we have learned in the past weeks, and what we still have to learn, once the pandemic is over.  A lot of good things were constructed together and a lot of them can actually enhance the classroom experience. 

We cannot afford to throw to the wind all that we have learned in the past weeks- Owen Bonnici

The most positive aspect is  the realisation that parents, students and educators have familiarised themselves with online learning, and that makes it more possible in the future to combine traditional teaching methods with online methods. But one thing cannot absolutely change: our focus should always remain student-centred and our priority has to remain that of ensuring that every child has an equal opportunity to a high quality educational experience.

Not all is well.  We quickly realised that our mission that nobody falls behind in the educational sector has become admittedly harder as a result of COVID-19.  

We are continuously being told by our educators that, despite their best efforts, a number of students have vanished from the radar in the past two months and parents of students with learning difficulties are telling us that their children are finding it harder than ever before to remain engaged.  

That is why we prioritised social justice by ensuring that children from difficult backgrounds are given free access to online learning and we made sure that our inclusion programmes, including those which are given through specialised partnerships with NGOs, are provided online.  

At the same time, we are keeping in constant contact with school principals, directors and educators to try to offer support at the inception of the problem.

With all my colleagues and officials, we remain committed to continue engaging with the health authorities and relevant stakeholders while plotting our way ahead in the weeks and months to come. The next major appointment is summer school, which opens its doors in July.

We have spent the past months preparing to be in a position to provide such a service, limited or otherwise, according to instructions issued by our health authorities closer to the date. 

Let us keep pulling the proverbial rope in the same direction.  I have no doubt that we will overcome this challenge together.

Owen Bonnici is Minister for Education and Employment.