A new apartheid seems to have sprouted in Maltese society. Over the past few days hundreds of young people received their degree certificates in graduation ceremonies marking the successful end of their studies at university.

One can imagine how proud the parents of these young people must be when seeing them receive formal acknowledgment of years of self-sacrifice and hard work. No doubt these formal qualifications give them the best chance of finding a suitable job, which is one of the most fundamental ingredients for a successful life.

However, much as we rejoice in these young people's success, as politicians we are saddened when we note that this success is only reserved for just one sector of our society. Other sectors, almost as large as this successful sector, are struggling to attain levels of qualifications that are the minimum required if one stands a chance of finding viable employment in a modern economy.

I am of course referring to the 42 per cent of our young people who according to Eurostat statistics are leaving the educational system with no formal qualifications, and are destined to be dumped on the scrap heap of life. Despite very high expenditure on educational services, our educational system is failing these young people by not providing them with the tools they need to find a job and make a good start in life.

No amount of ribbon cutting of new schools, laying of first stones for new educational establishments or trumpeting the millions of euros we are spending annually on education, or simply ignoring the shameful statistics that spell out our failure in education, will take away the serious problem of under-achievement in a large and important sector of our society.

The reality is that over the past 20 years, since the Nationalist Party has been in government, we have seen an apartheid system of education developing and dividing our society. On the one hand we have a very successful sector of young people who achieve academic success, and eventually find viable employment that gives them the best start in life.

On the other we have thousands of young people who are practically unemployable because they have underachieved in the years they spent in our educational system. We will be mistaken if we think that this is a problem that will only affect these young people and their families. The bad effects of such failure of our educational system will affect the whole of society and it threatens our strong social fabric, which for many generations has been one of our most important core values. It is also very superficial to say that the State provides a basic educational system, which is open to everyone and is free of charge, and blame failure on the carelessness of parents. Such an attitude reveals an intentional disregard of the difficulties being faced by a large number of our families to provide a decent living for their children.

We are once again facing a great risk of many of our families being caught in the spiral of poverty. Because parents are under-educated and incapable of providing sufficiently for their children, they have to work twice as hard to earn the essentials that guarantee survival. This leaves them little time to put their children's education as the most pressing cause of their main concerns. And the consequence of this is that these children spend their school years achieving little or nothing. Ignorance in this case is certainly not bliss.

A new Labour government is committed to change all this. The elements that are enabling half of our young people to succeed will be enhanced to ensure that this success continues. But we will also urgently engage our educators, parents, industrialists, and sociologists to ensure that the other half who are being short-changed by our educational system are given a chance to succeed in life just as much as the others.

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Dr Mangion is deputy leader of the Opposition