The schooling of students from immigrant backgrounds: A Maltese perspective in the late 1990sAuthor: Desmond Cahill Certainly, and most importantly from the perspective of this paper, government schools in high migrant density areas, especially in the western (and also northern) suburbs of Melbourne, did not perform well if the assumptions of the TER/GAT ratio are accepted. While conclusions are fraught with difficulty, extrapolations from the VCE results data for both government and Catholic schools in the western suburbs show that, especially in government schools, Year 12 students are underperforming ( see Tables 3 and 4). Table 4: Year 12 Results for 1996 and 1997 of Catholic schools in western suburbsCatholic High School | % Study Scores of 40 or more |
| Range for AAI/GAT* |
| Range for TER/GAT Ratio |
| 1996 | 1997 | 1996 | 1997 | 1997 | Chisholm College | 3 | 3 | 95-98 | 93-97 | 95-100 | Maclcillop College | 6 | 3 | 99-103 | 94-98 | 91-96 | Marian College | 4 | 3 | 96-102 | 95-101 | 95-103 | Mt. St Joseph | 3 | 3 | 98-103 | 96-101 | 98-105 | Penola College | 3 | 2 | 96-100 | 97-101 | 95-100 | St Aloysius | 5 | 4 | 97-102 | 99-105 | 106-114 | St Bemard's | 6 | 5 | 100-104 | 99-103 | 99-105 | St Columba's | 11 | 11 | 102-107 | 104-108 | 104-111 | St Joseph's | 3 | 2 | 94-98 | 91-95 | 92-97 | St Paul's | 5 | 6 | 95-101 | 93-98 | 94-101 | Sydenham College | 3 | 3 | 97-101 | 98-101 | 97-101 |
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The academic performance in Year 12 of those students from immigrant backgrounds who are stellar performers at Year 12 level and which the press love to highlight, may mask the other side of the coin, because the high migrant density areas are educating not only the first- and second-generation g roups of the more recently arrived groups but also the third- and fourth generation groups of the immigrant groups who arrived in the 1950s and early 1960s. It must also be acknowledged that there is a large group of lower-class Anglo-Australian students, especially boys, who are not performing well. An additional clue comes from the publication of the Victorian Premier's 1997 VCE Award winners, 238 students in all, who were the top ten students in the State in English and Mathematics and the top five students in other VCE subjects with special criteria applying to LOTE, history and information technology. Only one student with a Maltese surname is included in the list, and only two other students from government and Catholic high schools in Melbourne's western suburbs are listed. Based on this evidence and the findings of the Immigration and Schooling study (Cahill 1996), it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that students from immigrant families will be at greater risk, especially at the mid- and upper-secondary levels, though it is clear that students from immigrant families with strong business links (that is, business migration families in particular) are doing well in the educational race, as may be those from well-educated refugee families. The switch of resources to the junior primary level through the Early Literacy Program is to be welcomed but hides the other critical issue. It seems to suggest that the switch of resources from the secondary to primary level in the context of overall cost-cutting may affect immigrant student performance, especially at the critical Year 12 level. My overall reading of the situation is that Maltese Australians students have probably improved in their overall educational performance, as the families have switched completely to the speaking of English in their home environments and because of their attendance at Catholic schools which now have been funded by Commonwealth and State governments for the past quarter century. The establishment of Victoria University of Technology in the western suburbs has also advantaged the Maltese tertiary participation rate. However, extrapolation from the available data would suggest their entry into less prestigious courses in lower status universities with lower cut-off scores (see Clemente Zammit's paper in this volume for confirmation of this point). Further extrapolation from the results points to the fact that there may be a problem with the educational performance of Maltese Australian boys, as boys generally have performed less well than their sisters on both the VCE results and in the ACER study (see Helen Borland's paper for confirmation of this point in Maltese female/male participation at Victoria University of Technology). In his review of the ESL Program in 1984, Campbell had suggested that the ESL industry detach itself from the multicultural lobby represented by the ethnic communities. This in fact occurred after the 1986 crisis, when the Commonwealth govenunent endeavoured to cut the ESL program funding. In retrospect this has been unfortunate. The main political support for the ESL school program in the Australian context can only come from the ethnic communities and perhaps from the teacher unions. Yet this detaching resulted in the ethnic communities losing interest in the schooling issue, perhaps because the children of middle class community leaders do very well at school, or because the movement into the third- and fourth-generation by the children of the larger, longer established and more powerful immigrants groups has diverted their attention away from the greater complexity of the educational landscape. Instead, they have focussed on other issues such as the ethnic aged. Source: Maltese Background Youth - Editors Cauchi M, Borland H, Adams R, 1999, [Europe Australia Institute], p 9
    
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