Phase 1 is the easy one

On 23 September 2024, Pierre Fenech, CEO of the Institute for Tourism Studies, gave a media briefing with the only per-occupation breakdown of Skills Pass outcomes anyone has published. Phase 1 failure was 0–3% in most occupations (Luggage Porter was 8%, from very few applicants). Phase 2 did not.

Read the Line Chef row twice. 3% failed Phase 1. 51% failed Phase 2. Same candidates, same syllabus, same week. The only thing that changed is who was marking.

A month later, on 21 October 2024, Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo gave parliament the totals from the other direction: 4,082 candidates registered, 92% completed Phase 1, and only 53% of those who completed Phase 1 succeeded in Phase 2. Two independent sources, one month apart, describing the same cliff.

And Newsbook's press summary of the minister's figures put the mechanism plainly: “the human assessors have proven far more exacting than their digital equivalents”.

So the thing being tested in Phase 2 is not whether you know the job. It is whether you can hold a conversation about the job, live, in English, with a stranger who is assessing you. Phase 1 is an online exam of true/false and multiple-choice questions. You can pass Phase 1 with almost no spoken English at all — 2% failed even the standalone English test — and that is exactly why the cliff exists.

Look at the two ends of the table. Receptionist: 0%. Nobody applies to be a receptionist without spoken English, so nobody fails. Line Chef: 51%. A kitchen is the one hospitality role people take believing English is optional. The failure rate is not measuring cooking.

We are not going to sell you a course, and we would be suspicious of anyone who does on the back of these numbers. What the published evidence supports is narrow and unglamorous:

• Practise speaking, not reading. The gap between the phases is spoken English under pressure. Reading the Phase 1 material again does not touch the thing that fails people.
• Practise your own occupation's vocabulary out loud. The assessment is about your role. A Line Chef is asked about a kitchen.
• Practise with a person, not an app. The whole finding is that human assessors are stricter than machines. A friend, a colleague, anyone who will make you answer aloud.
• Book when you are ready, not when you land. Phase 2 carries a €5 booking fee, and a fail is not free of consequences for your timeline.

Whether these are still the rates. They are from September and October 2024. We checked on 17 July 2026 and found no newer breakdown from ITS, the ministry, or anyone else. The regime has changed since — Identità began verifying the pre-departure certificate on 1 March 2026 — so candidates and assessors may both have moved. Treat 51% as the last thing anyone measured, not as your odds today.

The exam questions. There are Google Drive links and Scribd uploads circulating that claim to be the Phase 2 questions. We do not host them, link them, or reproduce them. Beyond the obvious, they are useless for the thing that actually fails people: memorised answers do not survive a live conversation with an assessor, which is precisely what ITS said the problem is.

Your occupation, if it is not in the table. ITS gave five named occupations and an 'Other' category (39% Phase 2 failure). If your occupation is not in the table, the 'Other' figure is the nearest published number.