The schooling of students from immigrant backgrounds: A Maltese perspective in the late 1990s

Author: Desmond Cahill

In this paper, I would like to canvas some key issues regarding the schooling of students from immigrant heritages, but also specifically examine the current Maltese Australian situation, drawing partly on an historical perspective from the past fifty years. The last decade, beginning in New South Wales, has seen the rise of educational corporatism and educational managerialism as economic rationalist principles have been applied to the schooling sector. It has led to a new discourse in education, including its commodification with the application of new policies, the cutting of previous longstanding programs such as the Disadvantaged Schools Program and the introduction of new approaches and strategies. This new discourse has given rise to new terminology such as 'the educational product', 'customers and clients', 'quality assurance', 'schools of the future', 'schools of the new millenium' and 'navigator schools'. It has led to the demise of the ESL (English as a second language) education program, except for the component for newly-arrived immigrant children, funded by the Commonwealth Government since 1970.

Third- and fourth-generation Maltese Australians are now dispersed right across the schooling sectors, both government and non-government, but are still concentrated in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and there remains a strong though diminishing commitment by Maltese families (especially those with intercultural marriage partners) to the Catholic sector. The overall schooling sector has seen in recent years the downsizing of the teaching force as governments have sought to rein in their budgets, resulting in greater efficiencies, higher student-teacher ratios, greater stress for school staff, the shift towards principals becoming engaged in fund-raising and marketing exercises to ensure the viability of their schools and the shift from public to private schools as parents begin to lose confidence in local government and parochial schools. Now that the results are showing up in worrying literacy rates (as seen in the recent ACER study - see below), the economic managerialists have become hoisted on their own petard, but use the alleged incompetence of the teaching force as an acceptable scapegoat while underpaying and overworking them.

The movement towards school devolution and autonomy may be welcome if it does not prevent the needs of ethnic minority students in schools being adequately and appropriately met. The abolition of zoning, especially in the movement from primary to secondary schools, is creating, even within the government system, a bipartite system of greater disparity which is defended on the grounds that Australia needs to encourage its gifted students in a hot house setting and prepare a highly qualified elite to take Australia into the middle part of the 21st.century. This is exacerbating the divisions between schools: those with the 'easy-to-teach' students and those with the 'hard-to-teach' students.

As well, the new corporatist paradigm is encouraging the growth of full-time private schools including those sponsored by ethnic and ethnoreligious communities, which has occurred in a policy vacuum in a laissez-faire manner and which has once again brought out into the open the old "State Aid" debate. Alongside this has been the push, firstly, that all schools become autonomously managed, funded by an educational voucher system and, secondly, a fear that the demise of public education with the privatization of all schools is imminent. It is interesting to note that there has been no movement within the Maltese community, nor within the Italian community, to establish their own full-time community schools as is happening in the Arabic and Greek communities.

To effectively analyse the current situation in respect of Maltese Australians in the schooling system, I would like to reflect on the education of Maltese Australians from the 1950s through to the 1980s, and begin with the blunt fact that second-generation Maltese Australians performed comparatively poorly in the educational race of those decades. Data from the 1991 census comparing the educational profile of the second-generation groups of the major non-English-speaking immigrant groups who arrived during the 1950s and 1960s show that, whilst the parents were better educated than their Italian and Greek counterparts, the second generation Maltese group, who were all educated in Australian schools, performed significantly worse than their second-generation counterparts (see Table 1).

Table 1. Educational qualifications of first and second generation immigrant groups (in percentages)

(Source:Community Profiles, Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research (Based on 1991 Census.)
Level of Qualification
Poland
Netherlands
Greece
Italy
Germany
Malta
1st
2nd
1st
2nd
1st
2nd
1st
2nd
1st
2nd
1st
2nd
Higher Degree
0.9
0.4
0.2
0.5
0.2
0.3
1.5
0.7
0.2
0.1
4.0
1.7
Postgrad Dip
0.8
1.0
0.4
1.5
0.3
1.1
1.0
1.0
0.3
0.4
0.5
2.4
Bachelor Degree
3.9
5.7
1.7
8.7
1.5
6.4
4.7
5.8
1.2
2.7
4.1
12.2
Undergrad Dip
4.8
3.8
0.7
2.6
0.9
2.6
4.3
3.1
1.0
1.7
3.0
4.9
Associate Dip
1.2
1.4
0.4
1.7
0.4
1.2
1.2
0.6
0.9
1
0.8
1.8
Skilled Vocational
15.9
12.3
6.2
8.2
10.1
12.6
21.4
10.3
9.6
12.8
10.3
10.9
Basic Vocational
4.0
4.3
1.3
4.2
1.6
3.9
4.5
3.6
1.9
3.2
2.3
4.5
Other *
16.3
7.2
9.1
9.4
10.5
8.7
17.7
8.5
10.7
8.3
22.1
8.3
Total Qualified
7.9
36.0
20.0
36.7
25.5
37.0
56.3
34.1
25.5
30.2
47.1
46.7
No Qualificafion
52.1
64.0
80.0
63.3
74.5
63.0
43.7
65.9
74.5
69.8
52.9
53.3
Total
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0

Comprises level of attainment inadequately described and level of attainment not attained. Includes persons still at school and Not Stated.

Of course, this fact has been well-known to academics and community leaders for over twenty years, as reflected in the studies by Terry, Borland and Adams (1993) and Sultana (1994). Taft and Cahill (1978) had included a small sample of 10 Maltese families in their study of newly-arrived Latin American and British families. They drew attention to "the deterioration in acculturation and integration that occurred in the parents and children between one year and two years after arrival. When they arrived, the Maltese children went straight into their new school classes without any special integration procedures because of a belief that they were competent in the English language and the British style of learning. In fact, this policy seems to have had unfortunate consequences; in many cases the children began to slip back academically and, by two years after their immigration to Australia, about a third appeared to their teachers to be slow learners with quite poor ability in spoken and written English, especially the latter" (Taft & Cahill 1978 pp. 109-1 10). This warning sign was muted because of the small sample size and because of the feeling that this group came in the mid- I 970s at the end of a long migration movement and may not have been representative of the whole community. A more serious warning came with the series of studies of Martin and Meade (Martin & Meade 1979; Meade 198 1) who, as a result of a more intensive study of students at high schools in Sydney, expressed concerns about the educational performance of Maltese Australian students.

Source: Maltese Background Youth - Editors Cauchi M, Borland H, Adams R, 1999, [Europe Australia Institute], p 9

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