I’ve been made aware of Malta’s crisis in the education system via an interview by Jon Mallia with educator and businessman Morgan Parnis. The interview is alarming and an serious eye-opener. You can watch the full interview here.
Malta’s education system is not improving. It is being repackaged to hide falling standards and increasing failure rates. Students arte increasingly posting bad results in mathematics, Maltese and English.
Malta’s education system is not improving. It is being repackaged to hide falling standards and increasing failure rates. Students are increasingly posting bad results in Mathematics, Maltese and English, while the system responds not by fixing the problem, but by changing the way the problem is measured.
Until 2024, the SEC benchmark was relatively clear. Students who obtained Grades 1 to 5 were understood to have reached the required standard. Grade 5 was the minimum grade normally treated as the pass threshold for progression. Grades 6 and 7 represented a lower level of achievement, and a U meant failure.
Now, that clarity has been diluted.
From 2025, MATSEC introduced a new model based on Levels 1, 2 and 3. Level 3 is being presented as the new equivalent of the old Grade 1–5 standard, but it is not the same thing in practical terms. The new overall result is based on 30% School-Based Assessment and 70% controlled examination.
That is a massive change. It means the final headline result is no longer a clean exam-based Grade 5-or-better measure. It is a blended result. A student’s final level now includes marks awarded through school-based work, meaning the public can no longer easily see how many students actually reached the old Grade 5 benchmark in the exam itself.
If a student obtains Level 3 because school-based assessment helps compensate for weaker exam performance, that student may appear in the headline figures as having achieved the required standard. But that is not the same as saying the student clearly obtained Grade 5 or better under the old examination system.
This is not merely a technical reform. It is a repackaging of standards at a time when standards are already falling.
MATSEC’s own statistical reporting shows that between 2016 and 2024, the pass rate in Mathematics fell from 74% to 65%, while Maltese fell from 69% to 60%. English remained stronger and broadly stable at around 75%, but even there the system is not producing any great success story. At best, English is holding the line while Mathematics and Maltese deteriorate.
In 2021, 71.4% of English candidates obtained Grades 1 to 5. By 2024, that had fallen to 70.6%. In Maltese, the Grade 1 to 5 rate moved from 65.5% in 2021 to 64.1% in 2024. Mathematics was worse: it fell from 55.8% in 2021 to just 51.8% in 2024.
That means that in the 2024 main session, almost half of Mathematics candidates failed to obtain Grade 5 or better. Out of 4,622 Mathematics candidates, only 2,395 obtained Grades 1 to 5. Another 839 obtained the weaker Grades 6 or 7, 999 were unclassified, and 389 were absent. This is not a marginal problem. This is a national educational disaster.
Mathematics is the most obvious catastrophe. It remains the weakest of the three core subjects. In 2023, only 51.1% of candidates obtained Grades 1 to 5 in Mathematics, and in 2024 the figure barely recovered to 51.8%. In other words, even before the new Level system was introduced, Malta had reached the point where nearly one in every two Mathematics candidates was not reaching the old Grade 5 benchmark in the main session.
The 2025 figures do not rescue the picture. Even under the new Level system, Mathematics continued to lag badly behind English and Maltese. After both the main and supplementary sessions, 76.8% of 16-year-old candidates obtained Level 3 in English, 76.0% obtained Level 3 in Maltese, but only 66.1% obtained Level 3 in Mathematics. When measured against the full population of 16-year-olds residing in Malta, the picture is even uglier: 65.6% for English, 58.1% for Maltese, and just 55.3% for Mathematics.
The supplementary session also exposes the weakness. In 2025, 1,689 candidates were eligible to resit Mathematics, and 791 actually registered for the supplementary session. That was the highest number among the three core subjects and represented 46.8% of eligible candidates. By comparison, the supplementary registration rate was 40.0% for English and 42.0% for Maltese. Students are not just struggling in Mathematics; they are struggling in numbers large enough to distort the entire system.
Maltese is another scandal. In 2024, only 2,543 out of 3,968 candidates obtained Grades 1 to 5 in the main session. Another 925 were unclassified and 207 were absent.
English is doing better by comparison, but that is a low bar. In 2024, 3,192 out of 4,519 English candidates obtained Grades 1 to 5, while 699 were unclassified and 178 were absent. English remains the strongest of the three core subjects, but it is not improving in any meaningful way. It is merely declining more slowly than Mathematics and Maltese.
So the story is simple. Mathematics is collapsing. Maltese is deteriorating. English is stagnating. And instead of confronting this crisis directly, the Labour government has introduced a new Level system that makes the old Grade 5 benchmark harder for the public to track.
Note the chart below how failure rates have been concealed with the new system introduced in 2025.
Statistics are sourced from MATSEC.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
Leave a Reply