True to the name Grand Master Marc’ Antonio Zondadari bestowed on it in 1722, Bormla has been very much a “Conspicuous City” these past few days, as news broke that its younger inhabitants had failed their Junior Lyceum examination.

Statistics are a very powerful tool; they can inform the learned and deceive the ignorant in a way that is professional at face value but highly amateurish if taken only at that level.

Several considerations must be made in order to have a clearer view of the situation, as feeble quantitative data such as “none of Skola Primarja Marija Immakulata students who sat for the Junior Lyceum entrance examination passed” only elicits rash reactions, sweeping statements, crisis management and photo opportunities.

The result, which is truly dismal, should be considered on a national, regional and contextual level.

On a national level, 73.83 per cent of eligible students sat for the exams, with 62.58 per cent passing them. This figure includes the children attending government primary schools in Malta and Gozo as well as those attending private and church schools.

Given the structure of primary schooling in Malta, only 39.73 per cent of private/church schools students sat for the exams, as opposed to 90.16 of the students attending government primary schools in Malta and Gozo.

On a regional level, results in Cottonera were abysmal, to say the least, with an overall average of 33.63 per cent success rate. Kalkara scored the highest, with 47.2 per cent, while Vittoriosa came second with 33.3 per cent, Senglea third with 27.3 per cent and Cospicua, as we all now know, nil.

It should be taken into consideration that almost all the children attending the Kalkara, Vittoriosa and Senglea government primary schools sat for the exam, while only 17 of the 32 students at the Cospicua school sat for it.

In this scenario, it is very ironic that the three cities’ official names are Città Vittoriosa, Città Invicta and Città Cospicua.

Let us focus solely on Cospicua

As said above, of the 32 children who attended Cospicua primary school, 17 sat for the exam and failed.

The first thing that comes to mind in view of such a figure is that all Cospicua children born in 1997 are either mentally challenged or taught by teachers who should take more than a glance at the classifieds, or that there is a big social problem.

However, the 2005 census showed that Cospicua’s population stood at 5,642, with 997 children in the 0-14 age bracket, and 61 children took the sacrament of Confirmation in Cospicua in 2007.

This shows that 29 children (or 47.54 per cent) were unaccounted for in the statement mentioned at the start.

A comparison with Sliema brings out the bias in favour of private/church schools. According to the 2005 census, Sliema had a population of 12,993, with 1,328 children in the 0-14 age bracket. Just three years later, official statistics show that only 27 children born in 1996/97 attended the local public school.

It is a well-known fact that a number of Cospicua children attend other government primary schools (Vittoriosa, Senglea, Zabbar and Fgura) as well as church schools.

Suffice it to say, there are three private/church schools within its boundaries or close by: St Francis School, St Edward’s College and De La Salle College.

Statistics show that 80 out of 82 students at St Francis sat for the Junior Lyceum admission examination and 70 per cent passed.

After taking all the above into consideration, one comes to the conclusion that the statement “none of Skola Primarja Marija Immakulata students who sat for the Junior Lyceum entrance examination passed” is misleading and biased and throws a lot of unnecessary bad light on Cospicua, which it already has in abundance.

The second consideration is the ability of successive governments to ignore, and in some ways foment, the social problems that have surely influenced the academic record of the school under torque. Paradoxically, Cospicua was the place of birth of a former President of the Republic and two Prime Ministers, two of whom where also Ministers of Education.

I remember another four incidents in my lifetime that really brought Cospicua to the forefront of the national media: Dom Mintoff bringing down the government in 1996 over the Cottonera project and his appearance on Xarabank to defend his position, the media fest over the so-called shoe box baby and the fight over the naming of Cottonera Garden.

The fact that all of the above took place in, or were connected to, Cospicua increased public interest, apart from the merits of the incidents’ news value.

However, there was no commotion when the children from other areas who attended the local government primary school failed to pass the Junior Lyceum Exam.

The recent matricide in San Gwann was nicknamed “The San Gwann Murder”; however, the hype it raised was connected only to the case, with the place name only used for reference purposes. I suspect that, should a murder occur in Cospicua, it would not be called “The Cospicua Murder” but would take its name from something connected to some particular aspect of the case. This is because public opinion tends to hold Cospicua in such low regard that the notion that a murder could have taken place there would be taken for granted.

Therefore, given Cospicua’s bad reputation and the generalised statement, it comes as no surprise that the media have jumped on the band wagon, the public was reminded that social problems were rife in this dark corner of Malta and the authorities clung on to solutions by reacting to a crisis that, quite frankly, could have easily been foreseen.

Some calculations demonstrated that statistics should be put in context and used as a tool to solve problems, not to deride the subject. As Julius Richmond once said: “Statistics are people with their tears wiped dry.”