Overview of the projects currently being undertaken by the Research Unit at the DRLLE
Studies into Children’s Wellbeing and Health Behavior in School-Aged Children (HBSC)
The Ministry for Education and Sport and the Ministry for Health are conducting 2 national studies about children’s wellbeing, namely the Children’s Wellbeing Study and the Health Behaviour of School-aged Children. The latter is a World Health Organization collaborative cross-national study that collects data from 11, 13 and 15 year old children every 4 years. The 2 studies are being conducted together because of the common topic.
The project aims to:
Gain insight into our children’s health and wellbeing, comprehend important determinants of health, and inform policy and practice to better the lives of young people.
Data Collection:
This study is being conducted at middle and secondary state, church, and independent schools, each child is being provided a tablet to complete an 80-minute anonymous questionnaire in Maltese or in English.
Project timeframe: January – March 2022
Migrant Students in the State School Sector: A Study of Experiences, Impact, Issues and Challenges
The Ministry for Education and Employment, through the Directorate for the Curriculum, Life Long Learning and Employability, is currently conducting a project on migrant students in the State school sector.
The aims of this project are:
- To provide a scientific, empirically-based exploration of the impact of migrant students in primary and secondary schools.
- To shed light on the experiences of migrant students in Malta and feed in to policy recommendations.
- To highlight good practices and raise awareness of the needs of this student cohort
- To seek to map out the experiences, impact, issues, opinions and concerns of migrant students and their parents/guardians, Maltese students and their parents/guardians, teachers of migrant students and SMTs.
This project consists of a number of focus groups and a questionnaire with the above mentioned stakeholders. This project is being undertaken under the guidance of Prof. Mark Borg.
Timeframe: 2019/20: Focus groups with Maltese and non-Maltese students their parents, teachers and with the senior management team.
Research and Policy Documentation Centre (RPDC)
The setup of a Research and Policy Documentation Centre (RPDC) as a data and documentation archive for Ministry for Education and Employment staff.
The aim of the RPDC is:
- To contribute to the development of evidence-based policy and practice through facilitating the exchange of information, related to the remit of the Ministry for Education and Employment (MEDE), in a reliable and timely manner.
Eurydice
Eurydice is a network of 40 national units based in 37 countries of the Erasmus+ programme. It showcases how education systems are organised in Europe and how they work. Malta contributes to the network via an Erasmus+ project by submitting descriptions of its national education system, studies devoted to specific topics and statistics in the field of education, which are then compiled into reports along with equivalent data from other European countries. These reports may then form the basis for policy development both at a national and European level.