LONDON - A Bermudian teacher is aiming to become one of the most powerful men in British education.

Patrick (Hank) Roberts, whose family still lives on the Island, could become the president of a new teaching union bringing together over 500,000 educators in the UK.

Mr.. Roberts is aiming to forge a single union in Britain - bringing all the main teaching unions under one umbrella. It would create a huge professional organisation with a powerful voice in the future of British education.

Mr. Roberts said he would love to head up the new group when it becomes a reality. That would make him possibly one of the most powerful people in British education.

It is a far cry from his early years in Bermuda. Born in Somerset in 1949, his Bermudian father Henry Roberts worked for an Island bank and the whole family lived on a small farm on the Heydon Trust.

His grandfather, William Roberts, was an MP as well as running the family grocery store on Main Road, Somerset.

"It was a superb place to grow up," said Hank. "It was absolutely wonderful and I loved the fact you could leave school and go swimming in the sea."

After leaving Bermuda at age 11, he has spent his life teaching in London and has been active in the teaching union scene.

He is now hoping to merge the National Union of Teachers, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, and the National Association of Schoolmasters-Union of Women Teachers into a new organisation that would represent all the UK's teachers.

And of the possibility of him leading the new union, he said: "It would be an honour for anybody. It is an elected position and it would be for the membership to decide."

Mr. Roberts, 53, who lives in Brent, London with his wife Jean, is a member of all three of the unions in question and is hoping allies at the top of the organisations will help push the changes through. He narrowly missed out on becoming the general secretary of the ATL in April.

It is a far cry from his school days at Sandys Grammar School and his final months in Bermuda which he spent looking after his dying father. Shortly before, his mother, Jean, a British woman, took his two younger brothers, Peter and David, back to Britain to start a new life. After his father's death, 11-year-old Patrick followed.

He picked up the name Hank after wearing glasses like Hank, from Hank B. Marvin and the Shadows. His family travelled back to the Island at Christmas for a reunion with many aunts, uncles and cousins, and three years ago his brother Peter worked for a time as a tree surgeon in Bermuda.