Rotating students through the senior schools on a shift system is among the solutions being considered to handle an overflow of students next year, Minister of Education Paula Cox said yesterday.

However, the Ministry is also considering using classrooms which might otherwise have been sitting empty at Bermuda College as an interim measure.

The senior schools are facing an overflow situation in the 2002/03 school year as an additional year of schooling has been added to the Government system - Senior 4.

As the students will remain in senior school, Bermuda College is also expecting a shortage of students who might otherwise have move on to post-secondary education.

The college has said it may have to lay off as much as ten percent of its teaching staff should the students not be filtered to its campus.

While re-locating some students to the college would seem to solve both problems, Ms Cox said yesterday she fears removing the "best" students would create a dearth of role models within the senior schools.

The Minister said no final solution has yet been determined but that if Bermuda College is used it is unlikely to be an "all or nothing situation".

"Based on the discussions we've been having so far we may be looking at a hybrid position," Ms Cox said. The Minister also suggested that portable classrooms might be used at Berkeley Institute and CedarBridge Academy. A "considerable" number of students will be affected by the transition, she said, but determining the actual numbers will be among the duties of the Education Task Force.

"Some parents may decide to have children go overseas to further their education while attrition and failures may be that some students would have been staying on," Ms Cox said.

To speed up Task Force efforts to find a solution, Ms Cox said the deputy principals from CedarBridge Academy and Berkeley Institute have been freed of their regular duties in order to "explore options for time-tabling classes in the most efficient way and clearly quantify the additional classroom space needed at each school."

Additionally, the Works and Engineering Ministry has been asked to carry out a study on the space limitations at the two schools and the task force is currently surveying S3 students on their course options for next year to determine the range and number of courses that will be offered. "I am not here today to report on a final way forward as further work is being done to assess the best option for our students," said Ms Cox. "However, I thought it most appropriate at this juncture to provide you with an update and a progress report on the work done to date by the Education Task Force."