The St Nicholas Primary School in Mtarfa was shutdown and closed over a year ago, leaving local students without a primary school to attend in their locality.

The Ministry for Education had said that the students would be transferred to another school in Msida until the end of the last scholastic year, and then transferred to another school in the closer locality of Rabat at the beginning of the 2023-2024 scholastic year, which is how the situation currently stands. The Malta Independent spoke with Nationalist MP Rebekah Borg regarding the current situation. Borg has been actively involved in a petition for a new school building to be established in the Mtarfa locality.

Borg said that the petition has been waiting for an answer for months but still has not received any direct response which addressed their concerns, and she said that the Minister for Education is wasting time when it comes to addressing the issue. She said the minister's response to the petition so far was that there were structural issues within the old Mtarfa school building. She said that she has urged the petition committee to write to the Education Minister again so that he can directly respond as to whether a new school will be established in locality.

The PN MP said that parents had been drawing attention to structural problems at the Mtarfa school since 2017, and that the petition is not insisting that students return to using that same school building, but that a school location should be identified and established in the Mtarfa locality.

"The petition is not to use the same school. We are not saying to place the students in a dangerous building. What we are calling for is what the parents want, which is for a new school building to be identified in Mtarfa."

The current situation, she said, is a logistical hassle for parents. "Why can't their children have their own school within Mtarfa?" She questioned.

The newsroom asked Borg about her thoughts regarding certain sentiments that a new school in the locality would be unnecessary given Rabat's close proximity. She replied that Mtarfa, like other localities, deserves to have its own primary school.

"Yes, Rabat is close, but there are certain issues some parents have to deal with when it comes to sending their children to school outside of their locality." The parents of the schoolchildren have expressed these same sentiments, arguing that their children deserve to be catered for in the same way children in other localities are.

Questions were also raised as to why the school in Rabat was appropriate for the Mtarfa schoolchildren, when the reason why they would be able to begin using it was because the students originally using the school would be moving to a new building, leaving the old one available.

Borg said that if there were issues of structural defects identified beforehand, then the government should have handled the situation better. The fact that students had to go to Msida before ending up in Rabat was already a problem when they knew beforehand that this was a possibility. "There should have been a plan for the students to remain in Mtarfa."

The MP concluded by saying that there are a number of buildings being identified and dedicated for other projects, which she said is not a negative thing, but that there should also be a plan for a building which could serve as a local school to be found and identified.