A new strategy for early school leavers has been launched for public consultation on Monday, with a working document set to lay out goals for the sector in the education department until 2030.
Education authorities say that, among other things, they plan to use data to target students that are deemed most likely to drop out of school.
While Malta still has one of the highest rates of early school leavers in the EU, with one in six students having quit school in their teens in 2019, it has also made strides in decreasing the phenomenon, managing to halve the number between 2006 and 2019.
Early schools leavers are classed as 18 to 24-year-olds who have a secondary school education at most and are not in further education or training.
The term also encompasses students who do not possess at least five O levels graded between 1 and 7.
Pamela Spiteri from the Education Ministry's early school leaving unit said that early drop outs didn’t necessarily have a desire to stop furthering their education but often found it difficult to achieve the required grades to continue into upper secondary, among other phenomena.
She said that the strategy not only incorporated EU goals and data but had been based on interviews with students and parents of children who did not continue their schooling to better address the challenges faced by this cohort.
“This new policy aims to work on a strategy of prevention, intervention and compensation, with the goal to target certain indicators which we know have a high probability of non-continuation of education, like absenteeism,” she said.
“We are committed to tackling this phenomenon seriously because we can see clearly that it poses a high chance of leading to difficulties and societal exclusion later in life.”
New masters program on early school leaving
Spiteri added that the department would be launching a new Master’s program for educators to specialize in early school leavers.
Noting that the current rate of early school leavers stood at 16.7 per cent, Education Minister Justyne Caruana said that now was a crucial time to dialogue and update policies in the education context.
“We want to invest in people and give certainty to their present and their future,” Caruana said.
“We want to give students a strong foundation to work with and in the context of the pandemic we have to see how we can neutralize these challenges and create opportunities in their place.”
The consultation platform will be available online in the coming days. The consultation document is available online here.