The reports on the ALPHA literacy project were presented to the education committee on Tuesday. But the questions raised centred less on the substance of the reports than on the procedure, since MPs disagreed with the way it had been handled. The opposition criticised the embargo placed on the scientific report from the Luxembourg Centre for Educational Testing (LUCET), finding the decision hard to understand. The ministry responded that no one had been instructed not to publish anything, and that it was simply a matter of waiting until all the reports were available together. For Djuna Bernard of the Greens, one point was especially important:
"We have to prevent the doubts being raised about the reform from being further reinforced by a lack of transparency, or by the kind of moves we've seen over the past few months."
Bernard also deemed incomprehensible that the peer review had not been included among the documents requested by the Chamber, meaning MPs had had to retrieve it themselves from the university's website. According to her, this certainly did not help matters when it came to transparency. Luc Weis of the Education ministry replied that the ministry itself had only received the document the previous Friday, and did not have time to include it in the 340 pages containing the other reports made public on Monday.
For Sven Clement of the Pirates, many questions remain unanswered. On one hand, it is argued that too few children took part in the LUCET study for any conclusions to be drawn; on the other hand, conclusions have been drawn from it regardless:
"It's a bit like Pippi Longstocking: I build myself a world to suit my needs, deciding one day that I like it, the next that I don't. When it doesn't suit me, I ignore the data and say it isn't enough. It's rather strange that when we're talking about scientific data – and about the only quantitative study we actually have here, not just the qualitative ones, which make up everything else – we still have to ask how such categorical statements can be made when they simply don't follow from the figures."
Francine Closener of the LSAP said the reports clearly showed neither deterioration nor improvement:
"So we have to ask ourselves why we're doing this. Because we are, after all, disrupting the entire school system, sending hundreds of people for training, asking parents to make a choice as early as preschool – while in the end, in the tests, virtually everything stays the same. The rates of extended schooling were already at the same level back in 2019 in the pilot schools, just as low as before the ALPHA project."
Claude Meisch was quick to make clear that scrapping the project was not an option:
"We've always found a good reason not to change anything. And to anyone who thinks that a detailed LUCET analysis gives us yet another good reason to still change nothing, they'll find in me someone who cannot agree with them. Because I believe we're shown, year after year, scientifically documented evidence of just how unequal our school system still is today, and we have to respond to that."
Djuna Bernard likewise stressed that it would not be appropriate to postpone the planned reform by another two years.
Many MPs also expressed surprise that no representative from LUCET was present at Tuesday's presentation. Education Minister Claude Meisch responded that an exchange with all the authors of the various reports would be possible in future.
The pilot, launched in 2022 in four primary schools, allows children to read and write in either French or German instead of the traditional German-only approach, with the aim of giving pupils who speak neither Luxembourgish nor German at home a fairer start at school. The project is set to be rolled out across all public primary schools in Luxembourg starting in the 2026/2027 school year, expanding gradually to all age cycles.
