Home 

  History 

  Interactive 

  Settlement 

    Education 

      Maltese Youth 

      Learn Maltese 

    Associations 

    Migration Experiences 

    Migrants in Australia 

    Personalities 

    Maltese Identity 

    Maltese Language 

    Maltese Merchants 

    Ageing 

  Malta Link 

  Statistics 

  Library 

  Links 

  News 

  Search 

  About Us 

  Contact Us 

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

Author: Desmond Cahill

Why did the Maltese Australian group do less well in comparative terms?

What lessons are there for us? Whilst it might be tempting to attribute their educational performance to cultural reasons such as lack of educational and occupational aspirations or to genetic inheritance reasons inasmuch as the Maltese may be less gifted academically than other migrant groups, these reasons need to be rejected immediately as the evidence does not support such allegations (see the Martin and Meade studies). It seems to this observer that the reasons are structural and institutional.

The first reason is linguistic. Upon their arrival in Australia in the 1950s, the Maltese never made a serious attempt to maintain their language in comparison with other groups such as the Greeks and Poles, but neither were they encouraged to maintain and develop their language in those assimilationist days. The various theories suggest that failure to maintain and develop the first language, even if ultimately not overly successful, has a flow-on effect to second language proficiency (see Cummins 1979; Cahill 1985). The effort to maintain the first language within a community creates a facilitating climate whereby issues both linguistic and educational are continually being highlighted in the community and these academic preoccupations permeate the community. This has in fact occurred throughout the 1980s, and perhaps the results can already be seen in higher participation rates at university level.

The second and, by far, the most important reason relates to school funding policy until the early 1970s. The Maltese, to an even greater extent than other Catholic immigrant groups, attended Catholic schools, which received no government funding until the policy of State Aid to non-government schools was changed under the McMahon and Whitlam governments in the early 1970s. This had meant very large class sizes, often over 100 in the same grade, taught by religious brothers and nuns who were simply unable to cope with the needs of newly arriving immigrant children and second-generation Maltese Australian children. The Maltese paid dearly for their loyalty to the church, even though it must be stressed that the Church cannot be blamed for this as it was fighting strenuously for Catholic schools to receive their share of the taxes paid by the Catholic community, led by such key figures as the recently deceased Bob Santamaria.

A third reason was educational. The Child Migrant Education Program did not exist until it was initiated in 1970 by the then Commonwealth Minister for Immigration, Billie Snedden. But, as the research was to show, Maltese children, whether newly arrived or second generation, did not benefit as much as they could have because they came from a country where English is spoken, not as a second or foreign language, but as an associate language. The Taft and Cahill (1978) study showed that teachers over-estimated the English language competence of their Maltese children, especially in regard to written English, and did not give them the additional assistance they required, mainly because the finding was never enough to cope with the English language deficiencies of all children from immigrant heritages.

These observations and an understanding of the history of immigrant education in this country show that, firstly, financial resources are important in delivering a high quality education to students from diverse cultural and linguistic heritages and, secondly, that language issues are not understood, and remain misunderstood, by Australian educational policy makers. The demise of the general support element of the Commonwealth ESL Program has been driven by two misunderstandings: firstly, ESL need is in decline as the immigrant intake has trended downwards, which neglects to address the fact of the pipeline effect of the second- and third-generation cohorts in terms of which the number of NESB students is actually increasing. As a consequence, ESL need has plateaued, if not increased, in most States. Secondly, there has been the assumption that the academic performance of NESB students is very good. As outlined elsewhere (Cahill 1996), the data do not allow us to give a definittive answer. The various studies on ethnicity and educational inequality that have justified this thinking have used the rather blunt instrument of tertiary participation, making insufficient allowance for the smaller immigrant cohorts through the use of aggregated data, focussing too much on the larger communities such as the Italian and Greek that are now in their third and fourth generations, employing naive concepts of bilingualism, and using definitions of "migrant child" that are inappropriate.

Researchers such as Bullivant, Birrell, Seitz and Williams began to argue in the mid-1980s that, contrary to the received wisdom of the previous two decades, ethnic minority children had done well in 'the educational race'. Birrell and Seitz (1986) attributed their success to the strong and disciplined family support system, the peasant core value to survive in the face of adversity, and their ethnic pride and cohesiveness. Bullivant (1988) spoke of the ethnic success ethic, suggesting it was no longer possible to speak of educational inequality in respect of NESB students and that more focus had to be given to lower-class AngloAustralian students.

However, Jakubowicz and Castles, among others, argued that previous analyses had failed to address the existence of an underclass. They suggested that, "while Birrell's Monash University may have significant numbers of sons of Italian and Greek working class fathers in universities, so too do the dole queues" (Jakubowicz & Castles 1986 p. 9). Kalantzis and Cope (1986) at the height of the debate argued that it was dominated by the use of aggregate data and that important sub-categories within the collectivity of so-called migrant children were glossed over.

The whole ethnic inequality debate has now become reminiscent of the mistake made during the 1950s and 1960s when the 1959 Queensland survey of migrant children was badly interpreted, which, as the late Jean Martin (1975) argued, resulted in the issue not being addressed for more than a decade (see Cahill 1996 for an extended discussion of the ethnic inequality debate).

Hence, what is the prognosis for the future educational profile of the third- and fourth generation Maltese Australians who do not come under the birthplace or parental birthplace data? Other papers in this volume give partial answers to this question, but no recent study has focussed on the Maltese Australian group in its totality, and hence we must extrapolate from the available data.

The recent ACER study on literacy and the published Year 12 results here in Victoria give cause for concern. It is important to recognise that there is a powerful class factor operating, and that the underachieving phenomenon is affecting the poorer schools in the government, Catholic and independent sectors. There are now less resources in schools, and less resources for ESL education, especially for second- and third-phase English language learners. Teacher morale is low. Secondly, a 'creaming off process or, to use the jargon, the formation of residual schools is taking place because parents, now that they have a great range of choice at the end of primary school, are either sending their children to private schools in increasing numbers or applying to send their children to 'good image' government schools which then make choices about whom to accept. The point I wish to emphasise is that the educational future of third- and fourth-generation Maltese Australians, especially those in the high migrant density areas of Australia's major cities, may be at risk in the coming years.

The 1997 ACER Literacy Study

In September 1997, the 1996 National School Literacy Survey (Masters & Forster 1997) was published by the Australian Council for Educational Research after being commissioned by the Ministerial Council of State and Commonwealth education ministers (MCEETYA). This has been the first major study of children's literacy since the late 1970s, also conducted by the ACER (Bourke, Mills, Stanyon & Holmer 1981). The main sample consisted of 7,454 Year 3 and Year 5 students in 379 schools in all states and territories, and the testing program assessed five areas of literacy achievement (listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing). Parental birthplace data was not collected and hence the analysis could not fully ascertain the performance of the second-generation NESB group. The NESB cohort was based on language spoken in the home, and constituted 19 per cent of the total. Students resident in Australia for less than one year were excluded if the teacher requested exclusion.

External assessors worked with the teachers in assessing the children, and a condition of the study was that the results for government and non-government school students not be disaggregated. The study found that girls very significantly outperformed boys, especially in the expressive modes of speaking and writing, and that the children of unskilled manual workers performed the worst of the sub-groups examined (groups based on gender, home language and SES/occupational status). Significantly, the study found a larger school difference factor than is commonly reported in the literature. Achievement scores were higher for children taught by more experienced teachers or by teachers with additional qualifications. The study clearly found large differences between the ESB and NESB/LOTE cohorts (see Table 2). It was language other than English spoken in the home rather than country of origin that was strongly associated with low achievement (see Masters & Forster (1997) for the details).

Table 2: ACER 1996 Study: Literacy Scores of ESB and NESB Students

(Source:Masters & Forster 1997)

	Median	Estimates*
	Year Three		Year Five
	ESB	NESB	ESB	NESB
Listening	298	242	390	352
Speaking	287	256	357	340
Viewing	297	258	380	348
Reading	301	274	389	353
Writing	287	272	363	348

Based largely on a 0 - 600 scale with the Year 3 mean set at 300 with a standard deviation of 100.

The Year 12 Results

Various state governments have now begun publishing Year 12 data pertaining to all secondary schools. Victoria provides one good example of the trends, though Ken Boston, Director-General of the NSW Department of Education, has drawn attention to the relatively poor performance of some immigrant groups in NSW government schools in outlining the dangers of privatization and residualizafion to the government school system (Boston 1997; also Iredale, Fox & Shelaimoff 1994). Through its use of the Academic Achievement Index and the Tertiary Preparation Index, which are unscaled and scaled overall score respectively of individual Year 12 scores and the General Achievement Test, claimed to be a measure of a student's ability, the published range for each school in the Victorian data measures how well Year 12 students perform above or below their ability.

To use government jargon, the TER/GAT range measures the 'value-adding' dimension of school performance. In broad terms, it could be concluded from the 1997 results that independent school students mostly performed above their ability, Catholic school students perfon-ned at or slightly above their ability except for some (but not all) of their elite schools, which performed similarly to the Independent school pattern. Government secondary students generally performed below their ability except for those located in high SES areas and with the other interesting exception of schools with relatively high proportions of recently arrived students, though this result may be an artefact of the GAT test, with these students having relatively low GAT scores because of the English language component of the test.

Table 3: Year 12 results, 1996 and 1997, of Government schools in western suburbs.

AAI/GAT ratio is the unscaled pre-university Year 12 scores in relation to the student's score on the General Ability Test.

TER/GAT ratio is the scaled tertiary entrance score based on Year 12 results in relation to the student's score on the General Ability Test.

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