IL-MINISTRU TA' L-EDUKAZZJONI JINDIRIZZA SYMPOSIUM DWAR L-EDUKAZZJONI TAT-TFAL F'ETA ZGHIRA

L-Universita' ta' Malta f'dawn il-jiem qed torganizza symposium dwar l-edukazzjoni tat-tfal f'eta' zghira. Ghal dan is-symposium, jew Malta 25 kelliem minn sbatax-il pajjiz differenti biex jaqsmu l-esperjenzi tax-xoghol taghhom f'pajjizhom ma' dawk kollha prezenti.

Il-partecipanti lokali jikludu rapprezentanti tad-Divizjoni ta' l-Edukazzjoni, rapprezentanti mill-Fakulta' ta' l-Edukazzjoni ta' l-Universita', Kapijiet ta' Skejjel ta' l-Istat, Knisja u Indipendenti, ghalliema ta' l-ewwel u t-tieni klassijiet tal-Primarji, Kindergarten Assistants u studenti tal-B.Ed.(Hons) li qed isegwu units ta' l-'early childhood education'.

It-temi li se jitratta dan is-symposium jinkludu l-kwalita' ta' l-edukazzjoni tat-tfal f'eta'zghira, il-policies tal-Gvern u l-Opposizzjoni f'dan ir-rigward, policies dwar il-lingwa u l-litterizmu, il-bilingwizmu, l-investiment f'dan il-qasam u temi ohrajn kif ukoll numru ta' sessjonijiet dwar l-esperjenzi ta' pajjizi ohra mill-iSkandinavia, ir-Renju Unit, l-Amerika ta' Fuq u pajjizi ohra mill-Ewropa u l-Mediterran.

Il-Ministru ta' l-Edukazzjoni Louis Galea, illum indirizza dan is-symposium.

Address by Dr Louis Galea, Minister of Education, on the occasion of the Symposium on Early Childhood Education, held at the New Dolmen Hotel, Tuesday, 28^th November 2000.

When we talk of Early Childhood Education, are we to make the children ready for the schools, or are we to make the schools ready for the children? As many or most of us here today will probably agree, the answer should be "both". In the past, we have often forgotten that the schools have to be made ready for the children, and that is perhaps a large part of the reason that we are gathered here at this symposium today.

The countries of the participants at this symposium differ widely as regards their Early Childhood Education scenarios, and I am not sure to what extent this is a local concern only, but I know that in Malta we do face a special challenge. The fist part of the challenge is that we need to know how to equip our kindergarten level educators with the skills, knowledge and attitudes that are needed to completely transform our kindergarten education. Then secondly we need to be able to actually carry out this training well; and the third part of the challenge is that we subsequently have to ensure that the kindergartens do in fact undergo a rapid and well-monitored process of maturation and change.

That may be a very local current and topical Maltese concern, but it immediately raises issues of a wider nature, questions that, I would hope, will be discussed by both the local participants and the guest participants from other countries present today.

1. We have been aware for quite some time, for example, that the child is born learning, that she or he hits the ground running, so to speak. What does the child already know and not know before he or she goes into early schooling?

2. Also, at a very early age, the child becomes part of a culture, a culture that is different according to family and friends, and, even in a small country like ours, a culture that is different according to region – Gozo island is not the same as Malta island, and rural is not the same as urban. The increasing number of refugees and other foreigners in our schools are not starting off with the same absorbed culture as the other children.

3. Another dimension is the child's own intelligence. We have begun to speak not of the child's intelligence, but of the child's multiple intelligences – different aptitudes and competencies form the earliest ages.

So here we have at least three dimensions making children very different from each other in the manner and content of their learning even before they get into early school: their knowledge, their multiple intelligences, and their background culture. Given all this important difference between one child and another, is there any hope of preparing the schools fit the children. The answer must be yes, because one of the basic skills to be taught to teachers at this level must be flexibility - flexibility in dealing with differences, flexibility in responding to what this particular, and special, child needs and wants to know right now. The child is the centre of the educational experience. Educating and training workers for such flexibility is no joke, but if you had a small child getting ready for school, you would agree with me that we can afford nothing less. We do not want to homogenise children in our country. One U.N. Secretary General's famous rallying cry was "Let us make the world safe for diversity." Can we truly say that our own schools are already safe for diversity?

Training the teachers is only part of the answer. Working with the parents of pre-school children is also necessary. Besides that, we need to ensure that central and other institutions are ready for the challenge, and these must include a clear political will coming from the political leadership. In the United States I am told that they have a straightforward official national objective, worded something like this: All children in the United States should be ready for school. We should probably have some analogous aim ourselves, saying that by Calendar Year X, all pre-our children should be ready for school. By that calendar year we would all have to make sure that our children should have fully gone through all those experiences in home and kindergarten that ensure that the children benefit maximally from the potential represented by schooling.

Besides the training of teachers and specialised work with parents and a political and national will, we also need something that today's Symposium can in large measure provide. That is, we need good solid guidelines from educators about Early Childhood Education. In this special educational sector, we are fortunate that there are no constraints such as outside pressures forcing us to have exams and certificates for the little children. So I suppose ECE must be for you a creative playground where you can start from the richest and noblest image of what a person is, what a person might be, and come up collectively with guidelines for responsively and responsibly helping the child to start reaching much of her or his human potential. So, do work out world-class professional guidelines on ECE for us, and then together will make sure that all aspects of the jigsaw puzzle - the training, the work with parents, the programmes of work, the schools and the central institutions – that all these fall correspondingly into place without delay.

Yours is important "foundations" work, and while you are about it, you may well be enhancing the guidelines and directions not only of Early Childhood Education but also of the entire educational system.

Let me now go into a few more issues and some of the details of the current local situation.

This Symposium meets at an important moment in the history of Maltese education. This year saw the launching of the new National Curriculum for the whole range of educational provision, from Kindergarten through to Secondary Education. One of the major advances in the Curriculum was in the importance given to early childhood education. We now understand that academic success and, indeed, personal fulfillment later on in life depends very much on the quality of the formative experience of the child from the very beginning.

We need to ensure that children will be ready to have the best possible educational experience. We need also to ensure as well that schools have the best possible set-up to help students have such an experience. This mutuality is all-important; today we no longer put the onus of readiness on the child and the family. We used to believe that children should have certain skills--such as being able to count or recite the alphabet--or that they should be able to conform to a set of desired behaviours before they enter kindergarten. Today, however, instead of placing the burden of readiness on children, educators are being challenged to reconsider traditional beliefs about the school's role in helping young children continue learning and succeed in the school culture. There actually are two sides to the readiness issue: getting children ready for school and getting schools ready for children.

Research shows that by co-ordinating efforts with families and community resources to address the needs of young children, educators can improve children's readiness for school. Through school programs and strategies, educators can in fact improve the school's readiness to promote optimal learning for all children. All children are born learning, and schools are charged with the responsibility to nurture each child's learning potential and to provide opportunities for continued growth.

Because of inequalities in children's experiences and differences in their backgrounds, schools must pay attention to the factors that influence how families support readiness and the transition to school. Low maternal education, minority-language status as in the case of children of refugee families in Malta, low family income, and family structure are important predictors of children's developmental accomplishments and difficulties. Low family socio-economic status can limit the experiences, resources, health care, and the quality of child care available to children. Untraditional family structures or situations--such as foster care, single-parent families --also have an impact on children's early experiences. In addition, linguistic and cultural influences can affect a child's assimilation of the school culture.

Our schools and communities need to have the structures to counter these inequalities with concrete action. To help equalise the differences in children's backgrounds, schools need to work with community resources to meet the needs of children before they come to school. Our schools need to become hubs for the delivery of school-linked services.

How to respond to these challenges? The seeds of the policies and action have already been sown, in the new curriculum. This administration has taken a commitment for inclusion, and the new curriculum itself is based on the principles of

• quality education for all

• respect for diversity

• gender equality

• inclusive education

This means that the schools cannot be content by ‘igniting' the will and enthusiasm to learn in the few, or even in the many. They need to be restructured to provided meaningful and fruitful service to all, no matter how supportive or otherwise the family /community background may be, and no matter what the educational needs are.

The new curriculum acknowledges that this can only happen in a particular learning environment, based on the principles of:

• Holistic education

• School autonomy

• Increased participation in curriculum development

These macro-educational initiatives may seem far removed from the concerns of early learning education. However, the hard lessons learnt over the years in educational reform in Malta indicate that this foundation-laying, principled approach will be more fruitful and long-lasting then piece-meal changes at any one level of education. These changes will, I firmly believe, release the expertise and energies of the teaching profession and the local communities to seek out new ways of meeting the challenges in early childhood education.

Reference was made in the beginning that the concept of school readiness in early childhood needed to be viewed from two perspectives: getting children ready for school and getting schools ready for children. The new curriculum acknowledges this duality. On the one hand, it calls for schools to become more responsive to the individual needs of all its pupils. It does this through

• the development and implementation of School Development Plans

• an increased emphasis on staff training

• the eventual introduction of profiling and individual educational programmes in specified circumstances.

On the other, it calls upon schools to become centres for parent education, so that schools can truly become hubs of community life and learning.

The above are all medium to long-term objectives. However, we need to address the needs of children who are starting the journey into school life this year and in the next few years. We need short-term solutions for them and their families, so that the children come to school as prepared as possible, and the children who start falling behind are given that extra push.

Within this context three initiatives have been taken:

• The Literacy Programme

• The Let Me Learn Project

• The Institute for Child and Learning Support (ICPLS)

Through the Literacy programme, local communities with the greatest literacy need have been identified through a nation-wide survey. Now the Education Division, in conjunction with the Literacy Unit within the Faculty of Education at the University, is training literacy facilitators to go around primary schools and help the school communities develop programmes for their children.

The Let Me Learn Project is now in its third successful year. It is a collaborative project between the Division and the Department of Primary Studies in the Faculty of Education. The project emphasises the fact that children have multiple intelligences, which can be tapped and developed through different learning and assessment strategies. It is an important tool in bringing about the change in perspective within the whole school community – parent, child, teacher, administrator – that is the prerequisite for effective change in early childhood education. The Let Me Learn Project is set to increase, and we should soon start seeing the difference in approach and methodology in the primary schools where it was piloted two years ago.

The Institute of Child and Parent Learning Support (ICPLS) has been set up in August 2000, and will start its services in the first quarter of next year. Its aims are:

• To help primarily children at risk of school failure in the early years of primary

• To empower parents to help their children have a fruitful educational experience

• To influence day-time teaching by example of good, innovative practice

This is done in full co-operation with all stake-holders and established programme providers, and primarily with the Education Division and the Faculty of Education.

ICPLS will open 10 local centres in Malta and Gozo in which to run its programmes. The Institute will run two main programmes: HILTI targeted at children and ID f'ID targeted at their parents. HILTI will unite basic academic skills recovery techniques with self-affirmation methods such as developing drama and creative thinking skills. ID f'ID will empower the parents to own their children's education needs, and acquire the necessary literacy and numeracy skills to address them. ICPLS will work hand in hand with NGOs already in the field of child and adult literacy.

The idea is to eventually extend the role of ICPLS to support the family in creating an appropriate educational environment from the beginning of the child's life. The dynamic co-operation between school, ICPLS and community, in conjunction with other state service providers such as the Community Development Unit within the SWDP, can be the foundation of a school-as-community-centre experience that goes beyond merely using school premises for after-school activities. This network can help schools and local communities come together to create the necessary family and school environment for school readiness.

The three initiatives mentioned previously, along with the macro-educational changes mentioned previously, augur well for the future of primary school education in Malta. I look forward to seeing what this Symposium can propose that will complement these changes, that mostly impinge on the Primary sector, with initiatives specifically addressed to the kindergarten sector, in line with the direction of the new curriculum as expressed before.