€27 million for private schools: the unspoken truth is that the Maltese still worship segregated education

The reforms of the last decades for a more inclusive educational pathway for all students, have many times been pushed back by conservative educators and parents

Author’s disclaimer: I am the parent of two children who attend a faith school organised under the Catholic Education Secretariat; both attended a public school before one of them was selected, by lottery draw, to a seat in one of several schools. Had they failed to make the draw, we would have kept our children in the public schooling system, both for economic reasons as well as in the knowledge that public schools offer a comparable level of education as CES schools.

It is no secret that Malta’s three-tier system of schooling – State, Church, and private-independent schools – reflects longstanding underlying class and gender issues, and notions of the implied prestige of non-State school.

But the reforms of the last decades for a more inclusive educational pathway for all students, have many times been pushed back by conservative educators and parents – there is no question that Maltese schooling has reflected similar divisions in class and the inequalities of Maltese society.

A €27 million government subsidy to fee-paying private schools, to keep their hefty fees from rising further, raises questions as to how fair such ‘subsidies’ to wealthier parents are, and whether they privilege Malta’s segregated education system instead of pursuing equitable educational systems.

Is it right that the financial troubles of the schools where parents choose to pay in the hope of better educational outcomes for their children, get socialised and bailed by taxpayers’ cash? After all, these parents even get tax refunds for the implied ‘burden’ of paying for their children’s education.

Certainly enough, schools and society are often a mirror reflection of each other.

From common entrance to benchmarking

For many years, it was common for Church school students to outperform their peers in SEC exams. The implied prestige of these schools created a demand for motivated parents to have children sit for common entrance exams that promoted higher-performing students to a Church secondary school or a government Junior Lyceum. It allowed mainly non-State schools to cream off the best performing students of the island, albeit having garnered a reputation for a supportive, educational experience.

The 2011 phase-out of the common entrance exam was a challenge to those who believed this division between exam-ranked pupils reflected a natural order of life.

10-year-olds in their last primary school year could take a common entrance exam that would promote them either to the government Junior Lyceum for higher performers, or into a Church secondary school.

Those who did not take the common entrance, or did not make the grade, would continue to their town’s secondary school, and further streamed into an A section or a B section. Those who could pay, might have borne the hefty costs of a private school education.

The fixation with exam-mandated excellence certainly dogged the Maltese educational system: parents assumed this formalised pathway of excellence, conditioned their child’s progress towards a rewarding or safe career.

And it was a system that streamed kids early on in life, determining a different quality of education and even expectations for life – you could profile students depending on which school they went to. Church schools benefited from prestige and a strong middle-class catchment – it was assumed that here were future leaders and university graduates who could ace exams and clinch sporting glory, whilst industrialised urban towns took in the children of working-class families.

But by 2011, when the common entrance and Junior Lyceum exams started being phased out, Malta’s drop-out rate for those who did not continue school after secondary level was still a massive 36.8%. Clearly, standardised tests were also punishing the desire for further education.

Removing the Junior Lyceum exam meant channelling all 10-year-olds towards one regional second college. Gone was the streaming structure of area secondaries. Instead “benchmarked” students would be gently bifurcated only on the subjects of maths, Maltese and English – the operational word was ‘setting’, and teachers had to handle both sets within the same class. Easier said than done.

The common entrance and Junior Lyceum exams were a rite of passage that invited excessive stress on students, teachers and parents, learning useless information by rote and private tuition for written exercises. It was a high-stakes selection of pupils, that flew in the face of research that promoted an inclusive and equitable education system. Yet parents still worried that the end to this ‘elitist’ promotion, would lower their children’s achievements by having them blended in a class with lower performers.

Ten years later, school exams are now being gradually diluted, with a substantial percentage of a child’s final result based on school-based assessment.

“Standardised tests rarely address the range of abilities, learning styles and patterns, intelligences and learning difficulties. They tend to reinforce the one-size-fits-all pedagogical culture rather than challenge it,” Prof. Carmel Borg, of the University of Malta’s Faculty of Education, had told MaltaToday in 2011.

He knew well the fatalistic vision of those who saw academic failure as “natural, personal and inevitable” – the symbolic reflection of a society defined by winners and losers, rich and poor, and a bourgeois aspiration of translating academic excellence into status and wealth.

“They also fail to capture students’ dreams, imagination, the search for beauty and alternative worlds and possibilities, risk-taking, creativity, innovation and critical thinking. Moreover, they tend to breed student and privilege narrow curricula,” – words which today illustrate the idealistic possibility of what a general education experience could be like, one where “social empathy and… students’ higher-order cognitive skills are promoted and nurtured.”

‘Flight’ of the middle class

The fact is that Malta’s has lacked the unified educational experience of public schooling in countries like Italy or France and many other EU member states.

Instead, Malta’s segregated school system reproduced the competitive nature of parents’ expectations for children.

The 1980s proved to be a watershed moment for Maltese education. State schools suffering from lower investment and educational resources, compared unfavourably to Church schools. When Labour attempted a ham-fisted reform at making the latter free of charge – an attempt at forcing the rightful mix of students across all schools – it led to the 1984 lock-out and strikes.

But a generation of young, aspirational middle-class parents was scarred.

By the end of that decade, parents’ foundations started organising the financing and construction of a host of private-independent schools, in the belief they were the best guarantors of their children’s education – not the State.

Today, it is the State that is intervening to allow these parents to retain their free choice to determine their children’s schooling.

For it is safe to say that the cost of private education is a burdensome weight on middle-class pockets, cutting into normal spending habits. For the less-than-wealthy who chose private schools because they refuse to send children to a state school, the question is: is the belief that the state school system is inferior, that justified such a costly endeavour?

Parents who value the ethos of Church schools will hope for a lucky break in the annual lottery that assigns a limited number of places to new entrants.

The 1991 concordat engineered by the Nationalist administration swapped Church lands for a deal to pay Church schoolteachers’ salaries, which somewhat makes them public schools of a different kind. Their enduring ethos keeps attracting the attention of parents motivated about ensuring the best education for their children, a factor that also affects the mix of children in the non-State sector.

The PISA results of 2016, carried out by Prof. Carmel Borg, revealed an interesting facet about parental cultural capital: students whose mother had a tertiary education qualification were 59 percentile points more likely to access higher education provision than their counterparts whose mother held a primary to lower secondary qualification. Similar results (54 percentile points) were obtained when access to higher education was correlated with the father’s educational background.

Prof. Borg wrote in 2018 in Islesoftheleft.com that the socio-economic gap that characterises the end of compulsory education gets carried forward: adults from low socio-economic backgrounds who emerge from compulsory education with low levels of education, end up registering much lower take-up of formal adult education provision, and are likely to be early school-leavers.

“While recognising that the reasons for underachievement in education are multiple and complex and include personal and familial dysfunctionality, the above statistical indications suggest that the impact of social injustices, intimately tied to social, economic, fiscal, cultural, and educational policies, is strong,” Prof. Borg wrote.

These differences are clearly mapped out in the PISA results. Church and private school boys and girls score higher in science than the international average, and reading scores are better for private schools than church, and in turn significantly higher. These results reflect what Prof. Borg calls “the flight of the middle-class to the non-state sector”, which leave state schools suffering from a social mix with a concentration of the gravest social, emotional and behavioural challenges within the state provision.

“Such ‘flight’ has also created a differentiated habitus where social class distinctions and class-based differences in educational performance, linked to economic, social and cultural capital, are reproduced.”

Back to history

There is no argument here that this division of schooling cannot be eliminated in an accepted free market of educational choices. Many EU member states have had individual experiences of educational development that created public school systems that account for well over 80% and 90% of primary and secondary-educated pupils.

In Malta, the emergence of a new middle class from the 1970s onwards, inspired a a desire to take their children into the “middle class” schools organised by the CES and smaller private outfits; there was also a backlash against badly-handled educational reforms of the time. Beyond the fear that public schooling would be considered second-rate, the lack of a concordat with the Maltese archdiocese over its vast assets rankled with the Labour administration of the time.

In Confessions… former Labour PM Alfred Sant writes that in 1982 that the idea to make Church schools free had its critics, later on, from the left-wing of the party: they argued that the Maltese middle-class hardly needed a leg-up to keep their children in the nurturing environments of these schools. “What should have been done, was to devote all available governmental resources to making state schools better.. indeed to bring them up to the levels that they enjoyed ‘in the past’… and forget all about private schools. Meanwhile, church schools would get increasingly expensive to run and less able to compete with state schools, as they increasingly became able to cater excellently for the educational needs of children from all strata of society.”

It was the right, and perceptive critique. “But the die had been cast,” Sant says, and the option of conflict with the Catholic Church and its centre-right allies was to be pursued.¹ It was a costly conflict that would cement the perception of segregated schooling in Malta.

1. By the end of 1985, Labour PM Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici was reaching a deal with the Vatican on the future financing of the schools - free entry with state support, which persists to this day (Church schools today request formal donations from parents to cover other expenses); in return, the Church would devolve all of its land to the State. An important side-note is that in the years leading up to the eventual 1991 Concordat was the valuation of the Church properties in 1986 - according to Sant, these were valued at Lm40 million in 1986.