The primary years of education of our children, culminating in their transition to secondary school, should be all about nurturing and fostering a deep love, rather than fear, of learning. This is the fundamental message I believe Education Minister Dolores Cristina has been projecting since the inception of the education reform through a transformation of the primary to secondary schooling landscape.

Streaming bears negative connotations for such a delicate phase of education. It implies that children must constantly push themselves to make the grade; that if they slip in one simple end-of-year examination they will be lumped with a completely different group of students from the one they were with in the previous year. Slipping from a B to a C class or its equivalent also raises alarm bells for parents.

The fact that students will no longer be streamed from one grade to the next is therefore a very positive development. Children can now move from Grade 4 to Grade 6 without the constant fear that they will be detached from their set of classmates. It will also serve to develop a less stressful and competitive environment for children and parents alike.

Naturally, the elimination of streaming will have to be coupled with a boost in resources and support for teachers, both through hardware and software as well as through any training that may be required. Teachers will find it much more challenging to cater for classrooms with mixed abilities (in the traditional sense of the word) rather than streamed classrooms.

Removing streaming will raise the quality of the education provided to our children; it will allow all students the possibility to reach their full potential.

Yet, below the multiple layers of pedagogical details and rationales as to how the system works, the central principle prevalent in the model seems to be that of creating an environment within which children desire to learn and yearn to discover new things. It is within this context that all children can reach their full potential, whichever path they end up taking.

Schoolchildren will now have time to retain their childhood. They will find more time to practise their sport or musical instrument. They will find their friends outside, waiting for them when they return home from school.

The educational reform is a blessing for Maltese children but it will also be the death knell if it is not coupled with a serious change in the way we view education. Syllabi must be reviewed and changed to induce a learning environment.

The present system, with all the changes that ware coming into place, provide a perfect platform for any student to perform, and consequently excel. A vast array of opportunities can then be exploited within the whole educational sphere, in Malta, and in all other EU countries.

Europe has around 4,000 higher education institutions, with over 19 million students and 1.5 million staff. Some European universities are amongst the best in the world, and our own University is considered to be an exceptional one, however overall potential is not used to the full. I feel that not enough young people go to university after finishing school and not enough adults attend university, although numbers are always on the increase.

As we are doing locally, an a European level, curricular reforms are also promoted through the Bologna Process, in which 46 countries in the wider Europe are working towards establishing the European Higher Education Area by 2010. The Commission is helping member states and neighbouring countries in their modernising efforts through policy initiatives, discussion papers and forums, as well as through EU programmes such as Erasmus, Tempus and Erasmus Mundus.

One can imagine, therefore, a youngster who obtains his primary secondary and tertiary education in Malta then takes on an Erasmus Mundus in three different countries, and furthering studies with a Phd. We should be grateful for the structures that we have here, as they form an intricate network of independent systems that act together for one single person – the student.

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