Education Minister Louis Galea took exception to comments by the Opposition Leader in his interview carried yesterday in The Malta Independent, where Alfred Sant said Malta has among the highest rates of illiteracy and of people who go through primary education without really knowing how to work with numbers, or how to read and write.

Dr Sant, Dr Galea said, was showing himself to be cut off from reality and the achievements in the field of education.

Dr Galea also chose to reply to comments by MLP acting leader, Charles Mangion, on Sunday. TMID last Tuesday had also published comments given by a ministry spokesman following Dr Mangion’s statement.

According to the National Statistics Office, the minister said, the number of people who knew how to write and read in Malta had between 1995-2005 gone up from 88.7 per cent to 92.8 per cent for all ages. The rate for 20-29 year olds had gone up from 95.3 per cent to 97.6 per cent, and for 10-19 year olds from 96.9 per cent to 98.3 per cent.

The MLP deputy leader on Sunday said 42 per cent of students were “almost illiterate” when leaving school. The MLP was twisting facts and misusing an EU report on member states’ progress in achieving the Lisbon strategy, the minister said. In fact this report said Malta was making good progress.

The MLP, Dr Galea said, was manipulating certain figures to detract from the government’s achievements in the education sector. One of these figures related to early school leavers which for the EU related to those who did not continue with their studies after ending their secondary education. For Labour’s deputy leader those not continuing with post-secondary studies were “almost illiterate”, though a considerable number of them had ‘O’ levels, Dr Galea said.

But even in the number of early school leavers, Malta had made progress, so much so that the report the MLP quoted showed that between 2002 and 2006 those not continuing with their studies had declined from 53 per cent to almost 42 per cent.

Dr Sant also referred to the need Malta had to catch up with other EU countries in science and technology and in the number of graduates. In fact the report the MLP was using showed that Malta was having more graduates and students following science and technology courses. At the tertiary level the number of students had gone up from 6,300 in 2000 to 9,400 in 2005, which was an increase of 8.4 per cent.. The increase in EU countries was of 3.1 per cent.

In the last 10 years up to 2007 the number of students attending some post-secondary or tertiary institution had doubled from 11,000 to 22,300, Dr Galea said. The government was committing itself to raise the rate of those attending post-secondary levels of education to 85 per cent by 2015. To do this it was adding to facilities at the university and at the MCAST, with Lm50 million being invested at MCAST.