At present there are 893 young people aged between 16 and 20 who are registering for work. More than two-thirds of them, 595, have no Secondary Education Certificate (SEC). What kind of education system is producing so many young people who are unemployable and not just unemployed?
Last June, 5,600 teenagers completed their secondary education in Malta and Gozo. Just over half of them, 2,845, managed to get their SEC in Maltese. 3,014 students (54%) managed to pass their SEC exam in Mathematics. 3,170 (57%) obtained their SEC in Physics while 3,453 (62%) passed their SEC exam in English language. On average a staggering 44% of our school leavers last June finished their compulsory education (12 years of schoolings) without getting the skills and competencies they need as part of their basic survival kit in the globalised world of the 21st century.
Building new schools, networking schools through new colleges, re-engineering the Education Division, pouring more millions of liri into education, serve nothing if student do not get good quality education that gives them the skills to succeed in the 21st century. If more than four in 10 of our teenagers leave school with poor literacy, numeracy and science and technological culture, we cannot be satisfied with our education system.
Why are our primary and secondary schools still failing many young people and allowing them to enter the adult world without the skills and competencies they will need in society and in the economy? Education policy recommendations based on the OECD’s Programme for International Students’ Assessment (PISA) emphasise that schools need to do three things to perform well and come out on top in the world: get the best teachers, get the best out of teachers and step in when pupils start to lag behind. All this seems obvious. But it is not. Many schools in many countries round the world simply do not attract the best talent to teach in schools, educate teachers well throughout their professional career and intervene early and often when pupils start to fail.
The best performing countries in education are Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore and South Korea. What these successful countries have in common is not spending more money than the rest, or building new schools or changing their education systems often. The best performing education systems in the world attract the best graduates and governments take steps top ensure that teaching is a high-status profession. Getting into teacher training courses requires top grades and certainly becoming a teacher is not an easy option.
Once attracting top talent to teach, successful countries then go on to provide their teachers with top quality continuous professional development. In Singapore teachers are required to do 100 hours of training a year. In Japan and Finland, to help spread good ideas and best practice around, groups of teachers visit each other’s classrooms and plan lessons together. In Finland they get an afternoon off for this.
The most successful countries monitor schools’ and students’ performance closely to check if things are going wrong and standards are falling. Once pupils and schools start to fail these countries take urgent measures to address the problems. Finland has more special education teachers devoted to laggards than anyone else. A third of the students get one-on-one remedial lessons. In Singapore the bottom 20% of students stay after school to get extra classes.
Studying the PISA Report published recently the consultancy firm McKinsey concluded: “getting good teachers depends on how you select them and train them; teaching can become a career choice for top graduates without paying a fortune; and that, with the right policies, schools and pupils are not doomed to lag behind.”
If we are to stop having more than 2,000 teenagers every year leaving our secondary schools ill equipped for the world of the 21st century we must change our education policies and do what countries like Finland, Singapore, Canada and South Korea are doing to educate successfully most of their young people.