January 28, 2025 at 3:59 pm
MUT PR – MUT fact checks the Times of Malta fact checker
The MUT refers to the fact checking carried out by the Times of Malta on “How do Malta’s school hours compare to others in Europe?” The news portal claimed to have verified that Maltese students have “fewer hours and longer holidays than Europeans” It presented this assertion based on data obtained through a European Report entitled the “Recommended annual instruction time in full-time compulsory education in Europe 2022/2023”. This report included a compilation of European-Country data for 2022/2023. Upon the report, the fact-checker referred to the hours of tuition at school claiming that Malta was the only country that had less than 700 hours of tuition with just 691 hours. The fact checker concluded that “Maltese students have fewer tuition hours than Europeans”.
The Times of Malta fact-checker is wrong. What the fact checker did not check is whether the data presented in the said EU report was indeed correct! It would have taken the news portal just a communication with the Education Ministry or the MUT to verify the data or otherwise. The Maltese data in the report is false and the MUT has highlighted this error to the Education Ministry in 2023, upon the publication of the report.
The MUT is publishing the respective circular for 2022/2023 issued by the Education Ministry which provided the annual tuition time for students in each level. The tuition time for primary schools in 2022/2023 was 836.5 hours whilst that for secondary schools was 873 hours. Other than the 691 hours claimed by the fact checker and the EU report!
Based on the European average quoted by the same report and the fact checker, at 836.5 hours Malta had higher tuition time in primary schools than the European average whilst in secondary schools, the Maltese tuition time at 873 hours was within the EU average.
Furthermore, the fact checker claimed that Malta was behind Portuguese secondary school students who received 739 hours and also behind Finnish students who got 713 hours of tuition time. This is also false since Maltese secondary school students effectively had more tuition time at 873 hours than Portuguese and Finnish students.
The MUT hopes that this is not another orchestrated attempt to continue to push the agenda for longer school hours to increase productivity and have employees working for longer hours rather than discussing measures to improve children’s education and wellbeing.
