Education minister pledges ‘aggressive’ literacy drive

The Ministry of Educational Transformation is set to launch an unprecedented literacy campaign aimed at both children and adults, with the minister, Chad Blackman, vowing that reading has to be this country’s superpower in the drive towards future development.

“This is a country not having any military might or any large set of oil, gas, gold or bauxite reserves, but our comparative advantage, our strength, our superpower is the ability to lead in thought and to influence decisions around the world…Therefore, as we help our children to read, we are preparing them to lead the world,” he told the launch of Literacy Week at St Giles Primary School on Monday. 

Touting an aggressive rollout of the ministry’s Project SOAR — Strengthen Our Ability to Read — literacy initiative that will begin over the next few weeks, Blackman did not reveal details of the drive, except to say the goal was to boost literacy in both children and adults and involve both government and the private sector.

He said: “Reading is not simply an eight-to-four exercise in a school. Reading is not only an exercise on evenings when Mummy and Daddy are doing homework with you. It must now become the bread and butter for the future development of our country, and that is why over the next few weeks, we are going to see an aggressive rollout of a literacy programme the likes of which none have seen before that will capture the imagination of Barbados. Reading has to be our country’s superpower, which goes on to help us do many, many other things.”

Project SOAR would focus both on ensuring that every child can read by the age of seven and on boosting adult literacy, Blackman said.

“A part of this literacy programme and its rollout will be also an adult component,” said the minister. “Let’s face it, even though it is not a comfortable thing for many in our society to admit to, there are still a lot of our adults who find challenges with reading. That is why the adult aspect of the literacy programme rollout is going to be so key, and it will be done all across the country in different community centres and different schools, and on evenings and online—meeting people where they are at—so that it then becomes a national movement.”

The programme would be a collaborative effort involving partners from the private sector and non-governmental organisations, he said.

Acknowledging that parents lead busy lives, Blackman nevertheless urged caregivers to support the initiative, insisting it would prove beneficial for their children.

He said: “There are some challenges, and where they exist, we will ensure that we give the necessary resources and tools to close those gaps, and parents have a strategic role to play. Parents, of course, you are busy raising your family with work. If you want to give your child a global head start and make sure that these children that you have brought into the world can be prepared to be prepared and lead the future, you have to make sure that helping them to read is key.”

Emphasising the importance of reading in society, the minister said poor literacy could be linked to growing frustration among some young people.

“Much of the challenges we are now seeing with our young people, when you peel back, a lot of them simply cannot read, and it manifests in many things—through frustration and areas that we could have limited before with the right intervention. That is why we are placing such significant focus on literacy and on helping our children to read,” he said, adding that the entire country must be engaged in achieving the goal of full literacy.