This government has undoubtedly taken some laudable steps in the area of education since it took power a little over a year ago. In fact, a recent editorial in this newspaper heaped praise on the education ministry on the steps taken so far in its reform of the public school system, including the giant leap to co-education and the option to swap religion classes for ethics classes.
Both initiatives will undoubtedly bring Malta closer in line with today’s realities and the scholastic situation of Maltese youngsters’ European peers, peers they will compete with in the future not only in the job markets but in the overall stakes of life.
Having said that, the government’s rather abrupt and non-consultative decision to introduce what it calls a banding concept to state schools is more than ill-advised. And when experts in the field rise up en masse against a public policy it is not only the public and the media, but indeed the government itself that should listen attentively to what they have to say.
This is the case with an open letter sent to the education minister this week by no less than 27 members of the University of Malta’s Faculty of Education. This letter has not been given the media attention it deserves, so we are only more than happy to give it some additional coverage here.
The doctors and professors who signed that letter have expressed some serious concern over the move toward banding, which they, citing the UK’s Department for Education and Skills, describe as merely a “less differentiated form of streaming”.
They say they are “perplexed and perturbed” with the policy reversals contained in the circular by the Department of Curriculum Management, which requires all state primary schools to group pupils by month of birth from Kindergarten 1 to Year 4, to classify and allocate children in Years 5 and 6 to classes according to banding – “a well known form of streaming” – on the basis of their standardised results in English, Maths and Maltese, and to exert a degree of gender balance when allocating students to different classes.
Firstly, these experts point out that by grouping students by the month of birth, younger students will eventually find themselves streamed into lower bands by the time they reach Years 5 and 6 because younger students will not have the opportunity to benefit from peer learning from their slightly older peers. Their teachers will naturally have lower expectations of them and will not cover the same curriculum as the teachers of their slightly older peers. As a result, they will find themselves “engineered into the lower bans or streams further down the road”. This negative effect, according to the academics, has been studied in Malta and abroad and it is very well known.
Moreover, the very concept of streaming had been abolished in Malta back in 2011 following a wide and at times controversial consultation. That change had been made in the light of local and international reliable studies into the negative effects of streaming on individual students as well as on national achievement as a whole. Three years, the academics say, is too short a time to determine whether that change has been beneficial or not.
They also cite 30 years of research which they say strongly advocates against ability grouping as is being proposed. Moreover, they say the factors that have led the education minister to declare a “crisis” in educational achievement are, ironically, mainly attributable to the past selective educational system – which had grouping by birth month and streaming at primary level as major features.
Furthermore, they point out, the government’s much advocated ‘social justice’ is also at serious risk from the new policy since children from disadvantaged backgrounds will naturally be gravitated toward the lower bands – in the process adding to the intergenerational disadvantages that the government is actually trying to combat. It is, the faculty members who signed the letter argue, only a mixed ability classroom that can reduce achievement gaps between individual students in any single school.
They have called on the authorities to withdraw the circular in question “for the sake of all children in state schools and with the goal of raising individual and national achievement levels, we also hope that their call will be heeded or, at the very least, for proper consultations and studies are carried out before leaping back into the banding/streaming void.
We are, after all, speaking here about the very future of the country and if each and every student in the country is not given equal opportunities to develop scholastically, it is, at the end of the day, not only the students who have fallen victim to the perils of banding but indeed the whole of the country that will suffer the consequences further down the road.