MATSEC published its examination results on Tuesday, 14th July, and one number will alarm every policymaker at the Education Department. Examiners awarded no grade to 1,590 of the 4,694 students who registered for mathematics. That figure, touching 34%, marks the worst outcome for the subject in a decade. Times of Malta journalist Neville Borg reported the breakdown from MATSEC's own statistical tables. One student in three walked away from the country's core numeracy exam with nothing.
The classification behind that number deserves scrutiny because it conceals as much as it reveals. Since the 2025 assessment reform, MATSEC merges outright failures and absentees into a single category called NA. The board previously distinguished a U grade, meaning unclassified, from a simple absence on the day. It also published separate absentee figures, which let the public track both problems independently. The board has now stopped publishing that breakdown, without explanation or apparent regret. A reform that hides inconvenient numbers looks less like modernisation and more like diguising the truth.. Parents, teachers, and voters cannot fix a problem the state declines to measure.
Education Minister Byron Camilleri greeted the results with congratulations and reassurance. He said that achievement in principal subjects was like past years and promised free summer review sessions. MATSEC's own statistical table flatly contradicts the minister's soothing assessment. The NA rate in mathematics jumped from 28.5% last year to almost 34%. Across all subjects, the no-grade rate reached over 24%, two points higher than before. A five-point deterioration in the flagship core subject sits uneasily beside the phrase broadly in line.
The passing figures offer the minister no comfort either. Only 2,472 candidates, about 53% of registrations, achieved Level 3. That band replaces the old grades one to five, and universities treat it as a genuine pass. Most employers make the same judgment when they review applications for skilled positions. A further 522 students reached Level 2, and 110 squeezed through the lowest passing rung. Barely half the cohort, in plain terms, holds a mathematics qualification worth the paper.
We cannot dismiss this year as merely a poor harvest. MATSEC's figures show the fail-or-absent rate running between 22 and 26% before Covid. It then dropped to about 30% and has now reached a decade peak. One mathematics teacher told Times of Malta that exams remain as difficult as ever. Students' underlying skills, the teacher argued, keep weakening year after year across every cohort. Collapsing mental arithmetic drags everything else down with it, from algebra to basic problem-solving. In 2023, 40% of those who sat the paper failed outright. The Malta Federation of Professional Associations found the results worrying. It called for a thorough examination of the system. Instead, the government delivered a new grading nomenclature.
The system prefers lowering bars rather than raising performance. Junior College dropped its entry requirement of O-level passes in English, Maltese, and Mathematics in 2022. The education minister of the day denied any watering down of standards. Each change follows the same dispiriting pattern: when students miss the bar, ministers move the bar.
International evidence removes any remaining doubt about directing travel. In 2022, the OECD's (Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Develepment) PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) study recently assessed Maltese fifteen-year-olds. Malta scored 466 in mathematics against an OECD average of 472, and 445 in reading against 476. Only 67% of Maltese students reached baseline proficiency in mathematics. The OECD found no measurable improvement in any subject since 2012, a full decade of stagnation. Mathematics results actually fell below the 2015 level. The share of students below baseline proficiency rose by three percentage points over the same period. Education Ministers launched national literacy and numeracy strategies in 2014, 2019, and 2024 with lots of publicity. Those strategies bought fourteen flat years and nothing that PISA's instruments can detect.
The government will reach for its favourite counterpoint, so let us address it directly. Eurostat confirms Malta reached the 'early school leaving age' threshold before any other EU country since 2015. That achievement, a fall of 7.7 percentage points, deserves genuine acknowledgment. Yet retention without attainment amounts to warehousing rather than education. Keeping teenagers enrolled means little when a third leave the mathematics hall without a grade. What the metric measures is attendance at the system, rather than the system's output.
Labour statistics already clearly show the economic consequences. The European Commission's 2025 Education and Training Monitor records a collapse in Malta's STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) pipeline. STEM's share of tertiary enrollment stood at 13.9% in 2023, down from 21.5%. Employers registered over 1,700 unfilled vacancies in professional, scientific, and technical occupations. Vacancy rates in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) reached 5%, among the highest of any sector. A country that cannot grade a third of its students in mathematics cannot staff its digital economy.
Government resolves that contradiction through imported labour, and the population figures record the result. The National Statistics Office counts non-Maltese citizens at 29.4% of the resident population. Foreign residents cluster in the working-age cohorts that Maltese schools cannot supply. The migrants themselves deserve no blame; they answer a demand the state itself created. Ministers who lament overpopulation built the very economic model that requires it. An education system producing too few skilled school-leavers forces employers to recruit abroad at scale. Every NA on Tuesday's results sheet becomes, in time, another work permit.
The same government talks of a quality economy and of climbing the value chain. Quality economies rest on quantitative foundations, on citizens who calculate, code, and engineer. Malta's foundation is cracking, and the crack widens every July. To improve mathematics education, a responsible government should involve external experts to evaluate it, starting with young students. It will restore publishing absentee figures and separate them honestly from failures. It will explain why three national strategies moved no indicator in fourteen years. This administration renamed failure NA and declared the results broadly in line. Reclassifying failure, however clever the nomenclature, does not abolish the failure itself. It merely postpones the reckoning to a generation that never chose these policies and cannot yet vote against them.