Malta has a problem with early school leaving, and overly punitive responses have made the problem worse.
Tackling early school leaving was one of the key targets in the European Commission’s Europe 2020, a 10-year plan for sustainable development and growth. The Commission’s aim was to ensure that, by 2020, at least 90% of the EU population aged 18-24 completed upper secondary school. This was a particularly ambitious target for countries like Malta, where over 20% dropped out before completing school.
Although the Maltese dropout rate fell somewhat over the next few years, it remained stubbornly high and among the worst in Europe. It was against this background that the Maltese Education Ministry sought external expert help through the EU’s Structural Reform Support Service.
This research effort also contributes to UN SDG 4: Quality Education. The Sustainable Development Goals are 17 objectives designed by the United Nations to serve as a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet.
The Research
The IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) were awarded the resultant contract, which I led. There were three main elements to the research:
- Analysis of how Malta could improve early identification of children at risk of ESL
- Advice on how to increase the use of whole school approaches to ESL prevention
- Examination of Maltese policies and practices that might help or hinder early reduction in ESL rates
Working with the Ministry’s ESL Unit, we engaged in extensive stakeholder consultation, analyses of policies, practices and structures in Malta. We used contextual questionnaire data from international assessments such as PIRLS, TIMSS and PISA to identify how policy and practice in Malta differed from international norms or from what might be considered best practice. This highlighted some atypical instructional practices, a disconnect between policy and practice for reading instruction, and little recognition of the importance of school socioeconomic composition or of engagement with families.
In parallel, we partnered with Malta’s National Statistics Office to pseudonymously link student data from different national databases. The final dataset contained academic and background information on all students in Malta who should have completed compulsory schooling in a specific year. It allowed us to retrospectively identify factors that distinguished between those who did and did not complete school. While many findings were as might be expected, the analyses showed that some factors – such as geographic location of the family home – had an unexpectedly important role.
Impact
The Ministry decided that the research findings should form the basis of their new strategy on early school leaving. Originally planned for release in late 2020, Covid-19 and significant political upheaval in Malta scuppered those plans. The new national strategy was finally published in July 2023. Our work means that changes are planned from pre-school to university. Despite the delay in official publication, some recommendations are already in place.
Additional funds have been allocated to schools with a very low-SES intake, and the most disadvantaged families will soon have access free childcare and pre-school education. A national student monitoring system is in development, using indicators from our retrospective tracking to identify children and young people at risk of dropout.
Work is well underway to roll out a Maltese version of Ireland’s Home-School-Community-Liaison scheme, and a group of Maltese teachers have completed a specialism in educational disadvantage at DCU. The highly punitive – and counterproductive – model of monitoring student attendance is under review, as is allocation of resources for students with additional needs.
