The MATSEC results have just been published. And it’s a disaster.
One in every four students who sat for Maths or Maltese failed. Almost one in every three either failed or didn’t even bother to turn up for their exam. That’s a catastrophic result. After spending over a decade in school one out of every three students completing secondary education fails to achieve the minimum pass rate. Those results are even worse for students from government schools.
Our education system is a shambles. And it’s getting worse.
It’s not just Maths and Maltese. The results are terrible for all subjects. 32.5% failed environmental studies, 28.9% failed physics, 27.4% biology, 28.5% accounts, 25.2% religion, 24.6% chemistry, 23.6% English literature. Failures have increased across all but two major subjects since last year. It was terrible last year, now it’s even worse.
Compare that to England. Only 1.3% failed their English exam. You might argue, they’re English, that’s their mother tongue. English is our official language too. It’s absolutely mandatory for higher education. And our students’ failure rate is 13.6%.
In Maths only 2.5% of English students fail. In Malta it’s ten times higher - 24.8%. In Biology its 0.6% compared to our 27.4%, Chemistry 0.4% compared to our 23.6%. In Physics it’s 0.4% compared to a staggering 28.9% in Malta.
Which education system in the world has such disastrous results? No other country has such abysmal failure rates.
There is something disastrously wrong here. Either the education system is utter rubbish. Or the examination system is. Or possibly both. Irrespective of the real reason for the pitiful results, the outcome is the same. Over one fourth of our sixteen year olds are left behind. That is a major disaster for our country.
We’ve known about the utter failure of our education system from other sources. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) compares abilities of 15 year olds in reading, science and mathematics across OECD countries. The last assessment conducted in 2018 (https://www.oecd.org/pisa/Combined_Executive_Summaries_PISA_2018.pdf? ) showed that Malta scored well below the OECD average. Malta fares worse than Turkey, Belarus and Ukraine despite spending far more than any of those countries per student. What’s even more depressing is that Malta’s score dropped from 1390 in 2015 to 1377 in 2018. Compare that to Estonia which scored 1576 or Poland which scored 1541. Malta is trailing far below the OECD average - and it’s getting worse.
Education is the single most important issue for our country. It determines our future - every part of that future. Our economy, our competitiveness, our democracy, our health and quality of life depend on the level of education attained by our youth. Labour has let us down. Far from being the best in Europe, Malta is well below the OECD average, let alone the EU average. In the one area that matters, Labour messed up - badly.
In 2013 before Labour came to power Malta spent 7.58% of its GDP on education. In 2017 it was just 4.65%. In 2020 Labour spent slightly more as a proportion of its GDP, 5.87%, but still nowhere near what Gonzi’s PN administration was allocating to Education. Malta’s total spend on education was the 2nd highest in the EU as a proportion of total public expenditure. 14.2% of all total public expenditure went on education compared to the EU average of 10%. Yet Labour has nothing to show for it. Our education figures are not only appalling, they’re getting worse.
No surprise there. In less than two years Robert Abela cycled through four different Education ministers. As soon as Abela became prime-minister he removed Evarist Bartolo. Instead, he appointed the inept Owen Bonnici. So completely out of his depth was he, that within 11 months he was demoted. Instead of allocating the huge responsibility of the Education portfolio to somebody with some background in the field, Abela bizarrely put Justyne Caruana in charge. She barely lasted a year. Engulfed in scandal, Caruana was forced to resign.
Her first priority during those few short months at the helm of education was to manipulate the system to award her intimate friend Danjel Bogdanovic thousands of euro in taxpayers’ money for work he couldn’t and didn’t do. Her second priority was to battle the serious accusations of cronyism and corruption that she faced. When the inevitable happened and she was ousted, Abela botched it up again.
He appointed Clifton Grima, a lawyer and former Labour Msida mayor, as Education Minister. Grima had been cynically appointed by Joseph Muscat as Mount Carmel Hospital CEO. With no experience in health, let alone mental health, Grima presumptuously accepted the role and messed it up. He served as parliamentary secretary for sport between 2017 and 2020 under Minister Evarist Bartolo. The next thing he knew he and with practically no background in education and no previous ministerial experience Grima was burdened with the education portfolio.
Malta is now reaping the results of Labour’s flippant treatment of the Education sector. But does Labour care?
Indeed the abysmal state of our education system is Labour’s best guarantee for retaining power. Malta’s pathetically poor level of education is what ensures that Labour’s system of patronage, the very lifeblood of the party, is maintained. Repeated surveys have shown that Labour enjoys overwhelming support amongst the least educated. The Maltatoday survey of March 2023 showed that amongst those with only primary education, 60.8% support Labour. Only 21.2% of that cohort would vote PN.
A low level of education fosters a culture of cronyism and nepotism, deference to the political class and a tolerance of corruption. That is the fabric of third world countries not of European democracies. Education is the biggest threat to Labour’s power. Only Labour benefits from Malta’s failed education system.
Those exceptionally high MATSEC failure rates ensure that Labour’s voter base is constantly replenished. And Labour couldn’t be happier.