Contributions from: Carmel Borg and Ms. Salvina Muscat.
Abstract
This paper is concerned with how schools seeking to provide a caring quality education for the excluded are often so involved with the process of school improvement that there remains little energy for the substance of schooling. So overwhelmed by the disadvantage that their pupils suffer and with the burden of low resourcing and other national policies that the school bears, how can schools impact at the level of the classroom?
Based on the case study of a small secondary school in the highly selective national system of Malta, the paper looks at how the national context, pupil and teacher biography, issues of leadership and mission sustain or interfere with some types of change.
This school takes the small group of Maltese girls (from the Southern catchement area) who fail to obtain up to 15 marks out of a hundred in the 11+ national examination. Most of the pupils have had histories of childhood illness during primary schooling. A large proportion have other social problems, including poverty, broken families and absent parents, and child abuse amongst others.
Though incredibly committed to their pupils, many teachers in this school are not trained as teachers. Until a few years ago the school was seriously under-resourced. With the advent of a new and charismatic headmistress there has been a turn around in school improvement. A number of achievements, such as rising school attendance, collaboration with parents, in literacy, programmes to promote self-esteem and job shadowing for older pupils have changed the reputation of the school. Many parents whose daughters are 'school phobic' are actively seeking to recruit their children in this school. The retention rate of students has increased.
However, at the classroom level there remain significant problems. Teaching and learning and curriculum development have so far taken second place to other objectives in school improvement. Though the school is participating in a number of curricular programmes and remains more open than other schools in the system to learning from new thinking on curriculum and pedagogy for the excluded, the level of staff development has been limited.
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