MCAST’s New ‘Positivity Toolkit’ Is the Maltese Answer to Student Stress—And It Starts with Pastizzi

**MCAST Unveils First-Ever ‘Positivity Toolkit’ to Help Maltese Students Beat Exam Stress and Winter Blues**

Paola – While most students were still shaking sand out of their backpacks after the long Easter weekend, lecturers at Malta’s largest further-education college were quietly rolling out a home-grown weapon against anxiety. On Tuesday morning, inside a sun-lit atrium at MCAST’s main campus, Principal James Calleja handed the first printed copy of the “Student Positivity Toolkit” to 18-year-old Aiden Micallef, a Level 4 IT student from Żejtun who admitted he’d barely slept during the January exam session. “If this helps even one of us wake up without that knot in the stomach, it’s already worth it,” Micallef said, flicking through the 40-page booklet written in brisk, Maltese-English code-switching that feels more like a chat over ħobż biż-żejt than a self-help manual.

The toolkit—part planner, part pep-talk, part cultural love-letter—was devised by a six-member team of MCAST guidance professionals who noticed a 37 % spike in counselling requests last semester. “We’re not importing a Californian wellness fad,” insists psychologist Dr. Daniela Falzon, who led the project. “We anchored every exercise to things students already know: the festa fireworks schedule, the smell of lentil soup on Friday, the village bus route that never turns up on time. Positivity has to feel Maltese or it won’t stick.”

Each week of the academic year is given a “micro-challenge”: photograph one overlooked architectural detail in Valletta, send a voice note to nanna instead of a text, swap a takeaway pastizz for a home-packed snack and note the savings. Pages of blank mandala outlines are interspersed with QR codes linking to two-minute TikTok-style clips of local alumni explaining how they handled failure—among them 2022 graduate Jessica Sammut, now a game-developer in Stockholm, who confesses she flunked her first Systems Analysis mock but kept going by listening to Gaia Cauchi on loop.

Cultural relevance is more than window-dressing. “In Malta, family pressure is intense,” says Falzon. “You’re not just studying for yourself; you’re carrying the weight of three generations who never had your opportunities.” The toolkit therefore includes a “kitchen-table conversation guide” with Maltese phrases designed to defuse tension: “Ma niflaħx illum, imma għada nirreva” (I can’t cope today, but I’ll review tomorrow) is offered as a gentler alternative to the slammed-bedroom-door routine.

Community impact is already visible. The print run of 2,500 copies, financed by a €15,000 grant from the Malta Council for the Voluntary Sector, is being distributed free across all six MCAST institutes, but local band clubs and parish centres have requested an additional 1,000. In Għargħur, the St. Bartholomew youth section plans to laminate the weekly challenges and turn them into a parish treasure hunt; in Gozo, the Rabat scout group will translate the toolkit into Braille for visually-impaired students at the Helen Keller resource centre.

Employers are watching closely. Michaela Grech, HR director at gaming giant Betsson’s Maltese hub, says the company will pilot a summer internship shortlist exclusively from students who complete the toolkit’s eight-week reflection diary. “We’re not looking for straight A’s,” Grech stresses. “We’re looking for resilience, and this project measures it in a very Maltese way.”

Education Minister Clifton Grima, present at the launch, hinted that a scaled-down version could reach secondary schools by 2025. “If we catch anxiety at 14, we won’t need crisis counselling at 19,” he told reporters, shortly before posing for selfies clutching the bright-yellow booklet that students have nicknamed “il-ħeġġa” (the spark).

Back in the atrium, Aiden Micallef already has Week 1 ticked off: he photographed the art-deco balcony of the old Żejtun post office and sent it to his mother, who replied with a voice note in thick dialect that made him laugh out loud. “That’s the first time I’ve laughed during exam month since Form 3,” he admits. If the spark spreads, Malta’s winter of student stress could soon feel a little shorter—and a lot more Mediterranean.