Bermuda is "at least 30 years behind the rest of the world'' when it comes to teaching technology in the schools, says the man Government hired to help change that.

Mr. Pat Doherty, who has returned to England after completing only one year of a planned three-year contract, said it would be "a devastating decision'' if Government was to reverse course on its present school restructuring.

"They've got to recognise it's not a job to fix it and then go away and ignore it for the next 30 years,'' Mr. Doherty told The Royal Gazette .

Keeping up with changing technology was a "constant'' effort.

And while he understood the anxiety in Bermuda about the school changes, "I just feel that in such a small community, if everybody got behind it, they could make it work.'' He felt there perhaps had been "insufficient communication'' with the general public, and "perhaps there could have been more public opinion sought''.

The problem was that the wider the input, the more difficult it was to achieve consensus.

Mr. Doherty, 45, said it was mainly his family that caused him to leave Bermuda two years earlier than planned. He had hoped his wife and two children would follow him to Bermuda, but because of the point his children were at in their schooling, "it didn't make sense to relocate them''.

He said he had also taken a better job, one that he would have applied for had he never come to Bermuda. Mr. Doherty started work on Thursday as design and technology inspector for the Greenwich Education Inspectorate in England, where he is responsible for 15 secondary and 100 primary schools.

"I'd like to think in the year I was there I was able to give them some direction in the curriculum and in taking each school one at a time, looking at individual needs and resources,'' he said.

Dr. Joseph Christopher, senior education officer for curriculum, said Mr.

Doherty had helped conduct interviews for his replacement, who was expected to be on board in January.

Mr. Doherty's early departure will create a small problem with some planned training sessions, but "he has made sure as much as possible that it would not be a major hindrance'', Dr. Christopher said.

"The technology section remains of major importance to the Department of Education.'' Mr. Doherty felt his work with teachers had done the most good. "You can produce the environment and the resources, but unless you've got the teachers, all the rest falls by the wayside,'' he said.

Teachers "now have a vision of where they're going'', he said.

"What I really think I've done this year is is draw the map for the teachers, one which they didn't have before. I've described the journey they have to go on, but I'm not intending on going on it with them.

"Prior to my coming, they had consultants and attended conferences, each of which gave them a different interpretation of what technical education is about, and really bamboozled them,'' he said. "They were very, very confused.'' Mr. Doherty said there was a misunderstanding that technology meant computers.

Bermuda lagging behind From Page 1 In fact, it was about designing and making things -- tasks which computers could assist with.

He left both the department and the curriculum advisory committee with detailed information about refurbishment and other areas. "My successor can pick up from where I've left off, rather than start all over again.'' Mr. Doherty said he found his work in Bermuda interesting, but "I was frustrated by some of the tedium of getting things done.

"If you delegate, you have to go and follow it up three weeks later, and then do it yourself.'' And, "professionally, I found that I was doing work that I had done ten years ago''. While that was "an advantage to Bermuda,'' he was worried about falling behind in his career track.