Government could prevent some of the literacy problems in the public education system by lowering the school entry age, Opposition Leader Jennifer Smith has charged.

Ms Smith, who is also the Shadow Education Minister, was responding to news that some 50 percent of students in the Islands's only senior secondary school were functioning below the required level.

CedarBridge Academy principal Ernest Payette told The Royal Gazette the school had 17-year-olds who were functioning at grade nine level.

And he said he did not believe that planned modifications to the Bermuda Secondary School Certificate programme would help.

Mr. Payette added that it would take three to five years of a "concerted effort'' to bring many of the students up to an appropriate literacy level.

Calling the admission "astonishing'', Ms Smith said: "It's a very bad report card on the eve of the 21st century. We should all be upset and move heaven and earth to do something about it.

"These children have been in the system for ten years. Why has nothing been done? I'm sure that all of them do not have dyslexia or a learning disability.'' Ms Smith said the Progressive Labour Party had stated from the beginning of the education reform that change had to start at the lower level.

"It is now ten years later that we find that high school students are functioning below the required level,'' she said.

"Had we realised that this was a problem and given the primary schools the resources they needed, perhaps the problem would not be as serious today.'' And while she believed primary schools were doing a "wonderful'' job, Ms Smith stressed that they needed help, as did middle schools.

She said the problems shown at the secondary level were largely the result of frustrated students.

"Because if you cannot read or function, you cannot express yourself constructively,'' she explained.

Education Minister Jerome Dill has pointed out that the school system was being restructured to help underachievers. Special programmes, including a tutorial system which will allow one-on-one teacher, were in the pipelines, he said.

But he added that it appeared that youngsters were no longer getting their first experience of reading and books at home -- as they should before entering the school system.

While agreeing with Mr. Dill that children should first be exposed to reading by their parents, Ms Smith said: "If we felt that all parents were doing what they should, we would not have to legislate that parents have to send their children to school.'' Ms Smith also noted that some parents were reading at a grade nine level and therefore they could not teach their children to read.

"So while parents have a responsibility, society also has an obligation because society in the end bears the brunt of what happens to these children later on.'' Lower school entry age, says Smith This, Ms Smith added, was why the Progressive Labour Party in the 1996 Education Debate called for the mandatory school entry age to be lowered from five to four years of age.

"We asked that all children get that head start,'' she said. "All children deserve that opportunity. If the (Education) Act required nothing before a child entered school at age five, then it is unfair to say that that child should know x, y, and z.

"Our point was since we do expect them to know certain things, let us lower the (mandatory school entry) age to four.

"If we are not prepared to do so, we must teach those children as if they are starting at ground zero.'' Noting that Mr. Dill admitted that there were "lots of people we could point the finger at'' for the literacy problems, Ms Smith said: "Well if everybody is to blame, we should be holding everyone accountable.'' "Everybody's talking about accountability. But when it comes to our children we don't want to blame anyone.'' Ms Smith also stressed that Bermuda needed to determine what it wanted from the public education system.

"I keep asking what are the standards,'' she said. "This will allow us to know that every child that leaves the school system can read at a certain level, think at a certain level and will have certain analytical skills.

Without identifying such standards, what are we educating them for? "...I don't think it is good enough when someone of Mr. Payette's calibre is so upset that he will speak out publicly about the amount of illiteracy in his school.'' Mr. Dill later told The Royal Gazette he regretted that Ms Smith chose to politicise an issue "which is above politics''. And he said he wanted this to stop.

He argued that while the "overwhelming majority'' of children attended pre-school, lowering the mandatory school entry age to four would not help if parents did not read to their children from birth.