So there we have it. The new Labour government will not continue building a new school every year as was done during the previous legislature and as was planned to be continued over the next five years. Once again, Labour in government is constraining investment in education due to its inability to manage the country’s finances.

The writing was on the wall. The Budget speech had already indicated that something would have to give. The Minister of Finance’s presentation illustrated that the setting of the annual deficit at 2.7 per cent instead of the original 2.3 per cent would mean an increase in the national debt of some €450 million. That was already bad enough. But considering that the government is committed to financing the €30 million increase in expenditure resulting from the appointment of an extraordinarily large cabinet of ministers and their staff, while being unable to find the financing for five new schools for our children to the tune of some €35 million is, to say the least, unreasonable.

Consecutive Nationalist governments have considered education – from early childhood to life-long learning – as a top priority. Education has been deemed to be the key to the success of our youth, our workers and, indeed, our country. It has been considered the best tool for the eradication of poverty. And it was for these reasons that Nationalist governments always found ways of increasing investment in education, no matter how difficult the situation was.

In the last seven years or so, the government embarked on radical reforms in the area of compulsory education. The vision was put forward by none other than Louis Galea, father to numerous reforms in the local social sector, and ably expanded by Dolores Cristina. The introduction of the college system and the removal of the Junior Lyceum exam in favour of a more inclusive system, together with the launch of the new curriculum framework, had one single aim: for all our children to succeed.

A modern and up to standard infrastructure has, from the very beginning of these reforms, been seen as a complementary and, indeed, an essential component for the provision of a quality education. A modern school, or a tomorrow school as Louis preferred to call it, would be one that reached high quality standards in the facilities it incorporated: spacious classrooms, laboratories, sports and recreational facilities and modern technology.

From an audit of the situation, it was immediately apparent that certain schools did not have any potential for development into tomorrow schools. So government embarked on a project to build a new school every year to replace the old schools that lacked the requisites with a parallel project of major refurbishment in the other schools. This entailed heavy investment and huge sacrifices, but the government was committed and convinced that it was making the best use of its resources, that is, the building of new schools where necessary and refurbishing others where this was practicable.

Between 2007 and 2013, the government built seven new state-of-the-art schools – in Kirkop, Qormi, Bormla, Pembroke, Gozo and Mosta and the recently opened Tal-Handaq Girls’ Secondary School. It was planned to build another five schools over the next five years, starting with a girls’ secondary in Kirkop and continuing with others in Paola, Sta Venera and two in Hamrun. As a matter of fact, it was planned to continue building a new school every year until 2020. Another 32 schools, including those at Siggiewi, Luqa, Zabbar, Marsascala and Mosta, benefitted from extensive refurbishment and maintenance projects. In addition, the new MCast campus project and new faculty buildings at the University were secured through EU funds.

There is no question that a better environment enhances the learning experience and all these modern schools are now being enjoyed by our children. Of course, other schools and schoolchildren are still waiting for their turn and one would have thought that – as Labour had actually promised in its election manifesto that it would continue with the plan of building new schools – it would do just that. Maybe one would have thought that a Labour government would have been inclined to build more schools than just five in five years, due to its preference for smaller schools, but definitely we were never given the slightest impression that Labour would cut the programme short.

We always proudly stated that we were building a new school every year for our children, but we never said it was easy. On the contrary, we were fully aware of the challenges ahead. It was to this end that, together with the Finance Ministry and the Foundation for Tomorrow Schools, we spent the last two years or so discussing a model of financing for these schools. We did not reinvent the wheel, but rather we worked on a model that had proved its worth to us elsewhere. In short, we were going to exploit the commercial potential of old schools unfit for our vision of quality education. We struggled hard to maintain the levels of investment in education because the development of the talents and abilities of our children was always at the very top of our agenda, no matter how hard the financial situation.

Mr Puli is a Nationalist Member of Parliament and former parliamentary secretary for youth and sport