Keep repeating, Mr Bartolo!

The Labour Party is synonymous with slogans, most of which make no sense at all. Once again Labour MP Evarist Bartolo has recycled some of his old stories to fill his weekly column in The Sunday Times. He publicly declared recently that his strategy is one of repetition and this is what he did in his contribution of April 21.

The Ministry of Education, during the past three years, has continued to do its best to create tangible and concrete programmes which are directly addressing the problem of illiteracy. Away from the cameras and journalists, a team of dedicated people have been working hard to test the innovative Hilti (for students) and Id f`Id (for parents) programmes at the Gzira primary school.

Once the Foundation for Educational Services, which runs the programme, had seen it working and had evaluated its efficacy, the programme was ready to be expanded into another five schools. The six schools now offering this programme with the help of the foundation, the students and parents involved and the teachers are all witness to the benefits being reaped from this programme and the progress children make as a result.

The Hilti Tezor programme, although related, is a different programme. Mr Bartolo mixes up the two programmes. The HSBC Cares for Children Fund is being used to mobilise and train HSBC personnel as volunteer assistants in Hilti centres. It is also being used to promote the publication of new children`s books in Maltese for the six to eight age group for whom, it is widely acknowledged, there is a lack of choice. This programme, too, is a novel one and requires time to show more results.

Mr Bartolo tries to create a scandal by casting doubt on how the centres have been chosen and the "coincidence that two of the chosen schools hail from the minister`s district". The criteria used in the selection of the schools involved were based on the suggestions of resource persons consulted before the foundation embarked on the Gzira pre-pilot experiment.

Six schools, not 11, were chosen to ensure an effective pilot phase, and not all schools have a high illiteracy rate to avoid a situation where the Hilti team would be faced with too many hurdles at an early stage of experimentation.

Another whopper is that the Literacy Unit is being given "zero funds". A quick glance at the figures shows that whereas in Mr Bartolo`s second and last year in office the Literacy Unit received just Lm750, in the past four years, an average of Lm19,000 have been passed on to the Unit annually.

The initiatives I have mentioned are only complementary to other important programmes aimed at offering help to students encountering difficulties in their education in our schools, such as the literacy programme, the complementary education programme, and the specific learning difficulties programme, as well as the culture-change being brought about by the National Curriculum.

Mr Bartolo speaks negatively about the fact that EU membership is beneficial for our children. Yet, apart from the numerous initiatives hundreds of students and teachers are participating in, Malta has initiated and is currently co-ordinating the Parent Empowerment for Family Literacy (PEFaL) programme funded through Grundvig, an EU-Socrates programme. This translates into another Lm60,000 worth of investment in literacy-related initiatives.

We have already mentioned these facts. However, Mr Bartolo keeps repeating the same old stories. Most of his comments of April 21 are a re-hash of his column of February 24 and which we have proved to be totally erroneous and misleading in a full-page article on March 3 entitled "Illiteracy - putting the record straight". However, stay tuned and you will soon read Mr Bartolo`s same comments in the same column or in some other media.

Mr Sciberras is the communications co-ordinator at the Ministry of Education.