Last month, the head of the teachers' union, Marco Bonnici, called for the regulation of private lessons to ensure quality standards.

That was a timely call, as we have long been having a free-for-all situation when it comes to looking for private tuition. Parents who needed to send their children for one-to-one private tuition have equally been long complaining about how, despite paying high, sometimes exorbitant, fees, they remained disappointed as the expected results were not forthcoming.

With a background of cutthroat competition in various fields and sectors in our country, private supplementary tutoring outside school hours has grown significantly in recent decades.

The phenomenon is widely called shadow education because much private tutoring mimics schooling. As the curriculum changes in the schools, so too does it change in the shadow. Tutoring may be delivered face-to-face or online, one-to-one, in small groups and/or in large classes. 

This begs the question: What place should private tutoring have, if any, in a new social contract for education? Private tutoring has far-reaching implications for social inequalities, especially because higher-income households can easily secure more and better-quality tutoring than their lower-income counterparts.

So what approaches to regulation and governance might mitigate the potential inequalities arising from private tutoring?

Generally, private tutoring is delivered by teachers as a way to supplement their incomes. Other private lessons in various subjects are given by companies and by informal providers, such as university students.

Originally, the idea behind private tuition was that it could support struggling learners and further strengthen high achievers. However, it can also have a backwash effect on schooling. It exacerbates diversity in the classroom when some students learn in advance of others, and teachers who provide private lessons may have incentives to pay more attention to their private lessons than to their official duties.

Does this mean that private lessons should be prohibited from being given by employed state teachers?

Prohibitions on teachers providing tutoring may be found in many countries. Other countries only prohibit teachers from tutoring their own students, aiming to reduce the danger of teachers deliberately cutting content during regular lessons in order to force students to pay for the full content in supplementary tutoring.

So far, it seems that our government will continue to adopt a laissez-faire approach. Perhaps it has other priorities and/or feels a lack of capacity to enact and enforce regulations. 

Private tuition was not a significant issue during the era of drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The subsequent global expansion of shadow education and its implications for social inequalities are now very evident. Just as our government has developed sophisticated regulations for schooling (both public and private), it should consider developing sophisticated regulations for private lessons, better classified as shadow education. Much can be learnt from experiences with regulating the sector in different countries. Structures work best when they have understanding and agreement by all stakeholders.

Way back in 2011, the Education Ministry had announced that it would be taking steps to regulate private tuition, but, to date, there has been nothing tangible to show that such regulation was ever formulated, much less implemented and enforced.

In October 2016, Alternattiva Demokratika expressed its concern over proposed changes to the Education Act that, however, failed to address the lack of regularisation in the delivery of private lessons to students. It went so far as to express its objection to homeschooling, arguing that it went against the obligations of the state to provide education.

It is necessary to start changing the Maltese-rooted culture of parents persisting in sending their children to private lessons simply because their neighbours' children attend such lessons. Shadow education has today become a traditional aspect of education in Malta.

The state educational authorities must increase awareness of the extra and personal tuition that they provide for free to students who have not fared as well as they were expected to do or who have outright failed in getting the necessary grades.

Calling for the regulation of private tuition and shadow education in Malta does not mean that these should be totally banned, but rather, it would mean that certain safeguards are ensured.

For example, a growing phenomenon in Malta lately is that many schoolteachers are retiring from the classroom to become full-time private tutors. As they already have experience working in education, parents interested in or desperate to find private tuition for their children may find their CVs more appealing than a tutor's with little experience.

In such circumstances, shouldn't such private tutors take out some kind of insurance? There are two main insurance packages that private tutors should consider taking out to safeguard their students and protect their reputations.

A public liability insurance can protect them against any injuries that may occur on their property or any damages to a third-party property, such as a public space or their student's possessions.

Professional indemnity insurance would be applicable if a parent or student is unhappy with the service, ending up taking legal action against private tutors. This insurance covers all the legal costs and any compensation if lost.

The state education authorities should also consider imposing a restriction on the operating hours of private tutoring academies in an attempt to reduce the economic and time resources spent on private tutoring.

Above all, it is necessary to introduce some kind of private teacher work permit to enhance the education process, regulate the provision of private lessons for students outside educational institutions and curb haphazard practices in the sector.

Most important of all, however, is that each teacher giving a private lesson to a student must keep in mind that education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.