Education Minister Randy Horton said the public school system will have to face up to uncomfortable change as he spelled out the pressing need for reform.

Kicking off the debate into the review of public education he said Government would not balk at making hard decisions to counter unacceptable graduation rates which left students unable to make the most of all the opportunities around them.

He said: “We must be prepared to feel very uncomfortable because in most cases that is what change is all about. Change is moving from the known to the unknown. For many that is not a comfortable zone to be in.”

He said Bermuda spent nearly $14,000 per year on each public school child but after 12 years of school around half were failing to graduate.

“Under-performing seems to be too much a way of life in our education system. Equilibrium and peace in the populace changes when our young people are not achieving at the levels they need for entering our society.”

So instead of entering jobs and getting ahead youngsters were sitting on walls.

“At the end of the day where the transmission of skills is lacking the very social fabric of our nation starts to erode.”

He said the prison population showed high levels of illiteracy while too many young people believed violence was the way to resolve issued.

But he said effective intervention could do wonders. Quoting the example of Nikki Bascome who was featured on the front page of Friday’s The Royal Gazette after swapping his rebellious ways to graduate from an alternative school, Mr. Horton said others could follow if the help was there.

Children responded to high expectations put on them said Mr. Horton, a former school principal. “I have seen it, I have lived it.”

Government could not sit back and let the rot continue said Mr. Horton as he added that reforming the system was not the sole domain of one political party. “Improvement of the public education system has been described as a national imperative.”

He said the commercial world had a wealth of experience to draw on as he called on business people to join school boards and become mentors to public school students.

And he called for every organisation to get involved — including churches and clubs.

The education review was conducted by UK experts led by Professor David Hopkins. The team was called in to pinpoint why more than half the Island’s senior school students are failing to graduate.

After visiting each of Bermuda’s schools in March, they claimed a quarter of lessons were taught inadequately, the curriculum was inconsistent and principals were failing to ensure quality teaching.

Among their recommendations to improve teaching standards were an introduction of external assessors, staff performance reviews and the monitoring of each pupil’s progress. They also recommended that CedarBridge Academy and Berkeley Institute join together in a federation and that the school leaving age is raised to 18.

Mr. Horton said: “There’s been criticism the team did not spend much time in the class room. However let’s accept that these experts knew what they were doing and what they were looking for — they did not need too much time.”

He said the team had talked to everybody involved in education and public meetings had been held.

“Those public meetings were most revealing.”

He urged parents to stop pointing fingers at teachers and accept their responsibility in bringing up and educating their children. Without parental involvement students have less of a chance to succeed.

He said: “It is not enough to come to the Christmas play and graduation. We want to see you in the schools throughout the year learning about your children’s progress.”

And parents would receive information about exactly what their children should be learning each and every year, and what skills they should have mastered by the end of a school year in order to help parents track their progress.

He added that it was important for Bermudian children to learn their own history, instead of concentrating on European history. And the Hopkins report recommended more of an emphasis should be put on physical education to build a more well rounded individual.

The Minister also spoke of the interim board, which is meeting every week to discuss ways of implementing the report’s recommendations.

Shadow Education Minister Grant Gibbons>said his party was behind the report and wanted to see many of the recommendations succeed for the good of the country. But he pointed out that many of them were similar to ones outlined in the Education Planning Team, commissioned by the UBP in the 1990s, in particular the idea that schools should be given more autonomy,

And he added that the PLP had taken over education during a transition period but having six Ministers since 1998 had not been helpful.

He also questioned why the report, which said more transparency was needed in education, chose not to name the schools it deemed poor or mediocre and said many jurisdictions find publishing schools results acts as an incentive to educators.

It was imperative to follow recommendation one and dramatically improve the quality of teaching, he said: “We need more time spent on teacher training. In Singapore they spend 100 hours a year training teachers, last year the Government spent just $450 per student.

“There was also a lot said about the importance of getting good teachers to begin with.”

He added that he was interested to see how the second recommendation, regarding the need for more leadership from principles, would be dealt with.

Dr. Gibbons claimed the review only touched on the issue of technical education and said the country had “clearly dropped the ball” in that area, with less than 100 technical education students at Bermuda College and more than 400 being sent overseas by the National Training Board.

He also called for an independent inspectorate of schools and urged the interim board to act swiftly and transparently. He said he had heard of board members being called to chairman Philip Butterfield’s office at the Bank of Bermuda and being asked to keep quiet about plans for change.

That, he claimed, led to “further concern, suspicion and mistrust” in a system already suffering from a lot of “pent-up anxiety”.

Health Minister Michael Scott said the Government spent just over $13,600 a year on each student in the public education system, not the $20,000 often quoted.

He told members that the focus should be on educating the Island’s children so they were able to enter Bermuda’s “brilliant business terrain”, which had grown to more than $5 billion under the PLP.

Mr. Scott referred to the Pitt Commission of the late 1970s, which discovered that just 13 percent of students were passing four or more GCEs, and said standards had risen since then but not far enough. What was needed now, he said, was mentoring schemes and internships for Bermudian students with businesses on the Island. “We can’t afford to fail,” he said, of overhauling the education system. “To fail would be to cast ourselves into a night from which we may never recover.”

Shadow Health Minister Louise Jackson spoke of her sadness at the findings of the Hopkins Report. “I stand here really very saddened but hopeful that this is going to be something that we all solve together,” she said. Mrs. Jackson queried why the results were so poor when so much was spent on educating each child and described the lack of a common curriculum as “absolutely madness”.”It’s totally chaos,” she said. “The children are bored, turned off; the teacher is terribly confused and frustrated so this is where you get the discipline problem.”

Mrs. Jackson said she refused to buy the theory that social problems were to blame and read out examples of poor teaching from the Hopkins Report. She suggested that Social Rehabilitation Minister Dale Butler was laughing at the findings and added: “We are both getting a chuckle out of this. It’s either that or you break down and cry.”

Minister of Community and Cultural Affairs Wayne Perinchief said he believed the school system needed a complete overhaul, with the middle schools being removed and an additionional two years of education being added to high schools. “It’s a systemic problem,” he said, adding that a change to seven senior schools could have far-reaching benefits.

Mr. Perinchief also questioned why public schools stopped doing internationally recognised examinations, like the General Certificate in Secondary Education and pointed to the review team’s statement that the Bermuda public school graduation examinations were not as difficult as in other countries. “What we really need to look at is where we started to go wrong,” he said.

He also spoke about perceived nepotism in education and said: “Most of our teachers are Bermudian, all of the people in the Ministry are Bermudian and all of the people in the Department of Education are Bermuda. Many people are related by blood or association. That allows favouritism and a lack of will to change a system that is broken.

“We will have to bring people in from outside to make the change, not because of ability but because we are all so close.

“It is not going to make everybody happy and some will not like that they will have to go back and retrain but with progress comes change.”

And Shadow Attorney General John Barritt called for there to be more accountability in education and said Ministers should take responsibility for failures. There have been six education Ministers since the PLP came to power in 1998, something that had hurt the system, he said, because each new minister tried to take the education system in a new direction.

But he said there were ways to make it work. “We have to build on the things that work and get rid of the things that do not.”

Former Education Minister Dame Jennifer Smith said she took responsibility for inheriting a flawed system from the UBP in 1998. She said: “When we won the election in 1998 we did not think it right to put the system under stress and more change just because we got in power. We worked with what we inherited. Maybe we should have; hindsight is 20/20.”

Deputy Opposition Leader Patricia Gordon-Pamplin said: “We are responsible in that we lost the Government in 1998. If we had been re-elected that important transition period would have been nurtured and implemented it properly.”

The Shadow Finance Minister claimed Dame Jennifer took on the education portfolio as though it were the “most important thing since fresh air” but dropped it “like it was hot”. “It’s not about blame,” she added.

Mrs. Gordon-Pamplin urged the interim board to do what it had been tasked to do and encouraged teachers not to give up on any child in the system.

Shadow Works and Engineering Minister Jon Brunson said more and more young people would end up in Westgate prison if the education system wasn’t vastly improved.

“The harsh reality is that public education services predominantly the black community,” he said. “We have to have the will and the willingness to work together.”

Mr. Brunson added that sport, technology and the arts were all important components of a proper education system. He said getting it right was no longer an option but crucial for the success of the Island’s people.Former Education Minister Terry Lister said he hoped the review would also prompt the Ministry to properly track students so as to get accurate data about the education system.

He explained that some students left the senior system for private schools, and schools abroad so could not be lumped in as failures. And he added that just because students failed to graduate in the year they were supposed to did not mean they failed to continue education, and pointed to the scores of students obtaining a General Education Diploma at the The Tech or Adult Education Centre.

While he said he agreed with most of the statements in the review he said he did not believe that making it mandatory for students to remain in school till 18 was a good idea because many had no inclination to remain in school and would drag down the rest of their classmates by causing disturbances.

Shadow Tourism Minister David Dodwell said he hoped that tourism would become a big factor in the new education system and said it was vital to show students as young as primary level that tourism is a viable option for employment.

He also said more should be done in the way of technical education to provide students with various road maps to success, not just the professional track and international business track.

And said he hoped the two sides could work together to improve the system because nothing was more important than education when dealing with Bermuda’s future.