The CEO of the Institute for Education (IfE), Joanne Grima, believes that compulsory education - that is, schooling up until the end of secondary school - should be a growth experience in which the assessment of children and adolescents is reformed away more from its reliance on examinations, and is transformed into "growth profiles" where teachers can document students' progress throughout the years.

Describing her proposal, Grima said these growth profiles should serve as logbooks documenting a child's overall progress and development throughout the years, as a means to better promote students' holistic growth beyond just academics. This would include an increased focus on values and on learning what each child has and hasn't grasped in the classroom, thus going beyond what can be measured by an end-of-year exam mark.

"My dream would be for a boy or girl to enter school with a nearly empty logbook (partially filled up by their parents and childcare centre workers), and then that logbook is filled up by his teachers throughout the years, from kindergarten onwards, as the student continues to grow and develop," Grima commented.

She believes that compulsory education "should be a growth experience" where teachers, who she referred to as trusted professionals who learn precisely what each one of their students know and don't know, can document each student's progress via respective individual profiles that carry on with each child as they pass from one year to the next.

The IfE chief executive remarked that, in her opinion, the Maltese islands have too great of a focus towards exam results and openly expressed her disdain towards this widespread assessment method.

"Teachers know the curriculum and their students, and therefore, do not need exams in reality to display a mark that quantifies how much a child understands a certain subject," Grima stated.

Grima stated that should this idea come to life, secondary school children would leave Form 5 "with an almost biography". She added that her vision is for each child's growth profile to be filled with comments on their character and values, as well as remarks on whether they have reached all the learning outcomes for that scholastic year or not, backed up by their attached work (classwork, tasks, and other comments) for reference.

Therefore, these growth profiles could highlight specific areas of the school year that a child needs to work on - an improvement over the current end-of-year exam system, where students receive marks without understanding where they lost points, she added.

She stated that this would be very beneficial for students' future teachers across primary and secondary schools, since instead of commencing the new scholastic year anew and discovering the students over the first couple of months, teachers could review these profiles to quickly gain a deeper understanding of their new students.

The IfE's chief executive believes that students should begin being given a taste of tests and exams in their final years of secondary school so that they do not experience an even greater culture shock in Sixth Form.

All in all, she disagrees with the notion that exams should be the only tool used for formal assessments, arguing that "there should always be different modes of assessment - not to break down, but to build up the individual".

One of Grima's main gripes with exams is the lack of feedback and learning afterwards. In her own words, she told The Malta Independent on Sunday that "exams do not show what a child doesn't know, nor do children presently have the opportunity to learn what they got wrong in the exam".

Grima "harshly" disagrees with exams as an assessment tool, so much so that IfE will not conduct any exams for as long as she remains its chief executive, she told this newsroom. She said that teachers must empower their students if they use another method to get to the correct answer in order to promote their growth mindset.

"Exams are not done at IfE because there are a million other tools," she said while noting that exams are exclusively a school experience and barely present outside them.

"We send our children to school to grow and for them to improve, not to punish them and to print them a certificate to show how bad they were or to show how many exams they failed," she said.

Grima elaborated that "assessments alone do not allow students to grow" - the learning that happens afterwards or during it does, and so "a mark [alone] does not lead to growth".

"I can never agree with just a mark, a mark must be accompanied by a substantial amount of feedback," Grima said.

Last May, this newsroom spoke to the director general for Curriculum, Lifelong Learning and Employability within the Ministry for Education on the student-based assessments (SBAs) that have recently become integral to O-Levels. SBAs, which carry 30% of students' O-Level marks now, are assessments carried out by students' school teachers throughout their final three years of secondary schooling; marks are assigned by teachers as they deem fit, depending on whichever methods of assessment they select as well.

During this interview, DG Jude Zammit had said that the new O-Level system, with SBAs, enables students to be better aware of how they are progressing throughout the years, as it provides several new opportunities for educators to provide them with feedback on what they have been assessed on. In contrast, through an exam-centred system, students simply receive their marks and just see whether they've passed or not, he added.

The director general had also commended SBAs for enabling teachers to grade students on skills which previously could not be tested through the previous means of written exams, such as group work, researching, discussing, managing projects, and other tasks.

The IfE CEO believes that this assessment strategy, which is being enshrined by SBAs, is not being heeded enough across the Maltese islands, even though her institute is "proof that this works". Grima wants this to be more incorporated into schools' workings.

"We need to be less scared. Our teachers have to grab the situation by its horns and not fear that they wouldn't be allowed to take this up," Grima said. Continuing this message to teachers across the country, Grima assured them that doing so would grant peace of mind to their higher-ups.

While referencing the SBAs introduced some three years ago, Grima mentioned that nowadays, "this is already happening - we just need to give it more weight". She called for teachers to continuously improve their handling of SBAs and see that they always keep the wellbeing of their students in mind.

"The ultimate aim is the holistic growth of the child," Grima told this newsroom.

She also mentioned that, in her view, all assessments should be based on a predetermined rubric, which transparently outlines the way marks should be given out. She observed that using rubrics in marking assessments helps eliminate concerns that a student may have been graded by a stricter examiner compared to a more lenient one or any other concerns external to their own doing. All assessments at IfE are accompanied by rubrics for these reasons, she said.

Grima expressed that she has reservations over the lowering of standards for teenagers to enter university. The IfE CEO commented that today's children are not any less capable than those who came before them and also pondered on whether it makes sense for one institution to measure the academic standards for all students in higher education institutions.

She described that not all students are set to progress to the same institution after secondary school or Sixth Form, and hence, posed this question in the context that "the institutions receiving them do not have the same needs as the institution assessing them".

"There should be a rethinking on the kind of assessment that is being used," Grima said.

Founded in April 2015, the Institute for Education is widely known for offering courses for professions based in schools, mainly to teachers and educational psychologists, though this is subject to increase as IfE "is growing exponentially". Grima noted IfE's great challenge at the moment is attracting the right human resources to help sustain this growth to support its future vision. All courses within IfE are part-time and blended with some lessons being in-person and others online.

The Institute for Education offers courses for people who want to become teachers. However, its courses are not exclusively on offer to educators - there are available options for all sorts of people who interact with children, including social workers, heads of schools and parents. One of the most popular unaccredited sessions on offer at IfE is one for footballers' parents, so that they may learn how to best support their child in this sporting discipline.

Grima hopes for more people to learn about the Bachelor of Education (Honours) course on offer at IfE - specifically that students in Sixth Form or Level 4 at MCAST can apply for this before they achieve their results, on the condition that they'll be accepted after they've achieved them. She detailed that through this pathway, one can become a qualified teacher after four years and earn a full teacher's salary, which has improved significantly since the last collective agreement was signed.

The Institute for Education currently has almost 400 people pursuing some sort of qualification. Grima noted that the number of IfE graduates is increasing, with 118 graduates in the most recent ceremony, up from 100 graduates the year prior.