The Ministry of Education has been on the back foot over possible school closures since the news leaked out last week, and this has resulted in some mixed messages going out to the public.

Still, the reality is that the public school system has seen declining enrolments for some time now as a result of the exodus of students from public to private education, and to some degree, the departure of expatriates from the Island as a result of the recession.

Shadow Education Minister Grant Gibbons made this point some weeks ago when Parliamentary Questions revealed that Bermuda has a student-teacher ratio of 6:1, among the highest in the world.

In 1998, there were 6,700 students in public education; a decade later, that number had fallen to 5,785. But the number of teachers between 2003 and 2009 rose by 100.

There is a general assumption – and it seems entirely logical – that the lower the student-teacher ratio, the better student performance will be. But research around the world does not bear this out and certainly, Bermuda's results in recent years seem to disprove it as well.

Instead, and this was the primary finding in the Hopkins Report, it is the quality of teaching, not the quantity of teachers, that matters. And by the same token, it is quality of teaching, not the quality of the buildings or the degree of tinkering with education structure, that matters.

Most successful education systems seem to have a few factors in common; strong leadership from principals, good teachers who are given autonomy but are held accountable, and committed parents and local support.

Some of these factors are in place in the Bermuda education system and Hopkins laid out some guides for others.

The possible reduction in schools will give the Ministry of Education the opportunity to close some schools which are not performing to the expected standard and to move the students into schools that are performing, especially at the primary level. At the same time, this is an opportunity to weed out some teachers who are not meeting standards. In that way, costs can be reduced and performance can be improved.

That does not mean this will be easy. Communities have an emotional attachment to their schools which should not be underestimated or undervalued. Often, the local school provides stability in a community in the same way that churches, workingmen's clubs and local stores do. Take them away, and the social fabric of the community weakens.

But these benefits need to be balanced against fiscal sanity and the question of whether particular schools are providing students with the education they need in a world in which education will be increasingly important.

On that basis, the Ministry needs to take an impartial look at which schools are performing well and which are not, and make decisions on closures on that basis; not simply on whether a particular school has a lower enrolment than another.

Education Minister Elvin James has also asked for some more wide ranging reviews, essentially on the efficacy of the whole system. This newspaper's view is that care should be taken before embarking on another restructuring of the education system; better teaching, not a different structure, is the key to improving educational performance.