Strategy for early schools leavers launched for public consultation
A new strategy for early school leavers has been launched for public consultation on Monday, with a working document set to lay out goals for the sector in the education department until 2030. Education authorities say that, among other things, they plan to use data to target students that are deemed most likely to drop out of school. While Malta still has one of the highest rates of early school leavers in the EU, with one in six students having quit school in their teens in 2019, it has also made strides in decreasing the phenomenon, managing to halve the number between 2006 and 2019. Early schools leavers are classed as 18 to 24-year-olds who have a secondary school education at most and are not in further education or training. The term also encompasses students who do not possess at least five O levels graded between 1 and 7. Pamela Spiteri from the Education Ministry's early school leaving unit said that early drop outs didn’t necessarily have a desire to stop furthering their education but often found it difficult to achieve the required grades to continue into upper secondary, among other phenomena. She said that the strategy not only incorporated EU goals and...