Education Minister Dame Jennifer Smith got her first taste of the challenge of being Education Minister on Friday when she announced the public schools system’s most recent test results.

The challenge? That it is difficult to deliver a clear message on whether the school system is making progress.

What she could say was that primary school results in general remain respectable, but performances in maths at the middle and senior levels are poor, and get worse the further students advance through the system.

At the same time, students seemed to perform well in GCSEs, although the lack of detailed results made it difficult to judge just how well. If only the best students are entered for GCSEs, then the results will reflect that. Nor was it known how many students received grades of C or above, the usual benchmark used in school “league tables”.

Worryingly, senior school students performed very badly in maths in several tests, with less than a quarter of all the senior school students showing proficiency in the subject. At the middle school level, just 41.7 percent showed proficiency in Maths, despite the fact that the results in primary schools for maths and language arts were around 70 percent.

And yet CedarBridge and Berkeley were both able to graduate around eight out of ten of the students who started at the school four years earlier.

It may be that the senior schools are doing a great job of working with their students, especially at the S3 and S4 level, to get them to graduation standard. And it is true that both schools have put a great deal of effort into this in the years since they were reporting 50 percent graduation rates. But it may also be that the standards required for GCSEs and graduation are different from the proficiency standards set in the Bermuda Criterion-Referenced Test (BCRT), which is designed to benchmark progress, and the Terra Nova tests, which are supposed to assess the performance of Bermuda’s students against students in the US.

As Dame Jennifer said in reference to senior students’ poor performance in the Terra Nova maths tests: “However, students at this level undertake a barrage of tests and the Terra Nova is not one students consider crucial to graduation requirements.”

Although some very good students remain in the public school system for their whole academic careers, many move to private schools either after primary school or after middle school. This skews results, and means that the drop in performance from primary school to middle school and from middle school to senior school may not entirely be a “transition” problem.

As the system adopts more and more of the Cambridge currriculum this year and into the future, some of these problems may go away.

Regardless of curriculum, tests and school structure, the most important factors in education are good teaching and parental involvement.

Here test results are helpful. A teacher who consistently produces good results is good by definition. A teacher who consistently turns in poor results needs help, and if that does not work, should be eased out of the profession.

There was one pieceof important news that was released on Friday as well. Education Board deputy chairman Vince Ingham said in future, more individual school results will be made public. This will raise accountability, and that’s the most important thing of all.