An NSO news release dated September 20, 2021 declared “the number of persons with a low level of education [in 2020] stood at 203,151 accounting for nearly half of those aged 15 and over”.
If that little statistic doesn’t worry you much try this: “Persons with a low level of education had the lowest employment rate” (at around 64%).
Well, if they can’t be bothered to get themselves educated, then fair enough, right? Except, getting access to a good enough education system is not always down to your average fifteen-year-old.
Take this year. By all accounts, a tricky one. No easy decisions for anyone. And if ever there was a year to be a little more humane, you’d think this would be it. Right? Wrong. This year, where perhaps it was most acutely needed, there was no national plan of support for students facing high-stakes exams.
Matsec decided to shift its exams and resits later by around a month in response to rocketing COVID infection rates, and in an effort to buy some learning time for children taking high stakes exams. So far so good.
It would have been nice if anyone followed up on this move, but sadly, nobody did, effectively rendering the gesture useless. A few schools pressed on with a week or two more lessons than usual, but with little national support and no hope of the various national structures pulling together in a crisis. The students sat for exams bang in the middle of the worst heatwave we’ve seen in years, throughout June and well into July, mostly in schools with no fans, ACs or access to cold water. Results arrived mid-August, and yes, they were generally, perhaps predictably, underwhelming.
This year, however, some were still determined to get things back to the ever-elusive “normal”, which meant the academic year resuming, as usual, in September-October.
What about those later-than-usual resits? Ah well, never mind, was the response: let’s just get started, and the resit kids will just have to deal with it.
This is the usual response, and it’s bad enough, because even normally, the options are limited. There are MCAST and ITS, decent institutions but offering only technical, practical subjects; Higher Secondary, also ok, but state-run and underfunded, and it shows; a gap year (stupid to suggest this to a 16-year-old), together with the odd nod towards additional support; or Junior College/University - but prepare to leave sometime around the first orientation week if you fail a resit.
And this year, remember, resits were much later. So, seven weeks – not the usual one week (bad enough) - into new beginnings, attempts at normalcy etc., a fail in even one subject meant packing your bags, saying goodbye to new friends and teachers and if you’re lucky, trying to start again, someplace else, also several weeks into a routine.
Nobody wins. Not the teachers trying to get their classes to gel, not the institutions left to accommodate the upheaval of (a larger number than usual of) new intakes and dropouts, and certainly not the students.
I’m both a parent of a child currently running the gauntlet of high-stakes exams, and I’m also an educator. From neither perspective does this lack of planning look fair. It suggests nothing but lip service to the mantra of not leaving any child behind. Plenty of children have been left behind here.
Yes sure, exams are needed to prove eligibility for progression, but progression needs to be well planned and well supported by all stakeholders if we don’t want dropouts. This year, more than others, but really, in any year, those children struggling – often over just one subject - were the casualties of poor planning, lack of care, and lack of national support blatant at every stage of this whole sorry story.
It’s too late – and even more disruptive – to expect reparation now. But we should be prepared to swallow the bitter pill that those authorities to whom we have entrusted the care of our school-going children are failing us, when some children are repeatedly failing to progress. It’s time we, as a whole country, addressed the high school-leaver dropout rates.
It’s not rocket science that any chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It is time to pledge a stronger commitment to leaving no child behind, and that commitment needs to be honoured by every single stakeholder, including employers, unionists, ministers or awarding bodies, parents or teachers. We cannot afford to continue taking such an intransigent attitude towards those struggling through a system still designed for the survival of the fittest.
Sarah Grech is a parent of two schoolchildren and an educator of other people’s children.