Shadow Education Minister Grant Gibbons agrees with schools meeting informally on a regular basis but says the cluster board concept is concerning.

Cluster boards were recommended in the Hopkins Report and Government re-advertised for three assistant director posts of the clusters last week eight months after they were originally publicised.

But the number of posts appears to contradict Government's original plans which were for six clusters around the Island, each with an assistant director.

Cluster boards families of schools each consisting of a middle school and their feeder primary school and preschool were recommended more than two years ago and this newspaper understands that schools have been involved in informal meetings but nothing formal has been created.

The ministry has remained quite on the plans and has yet to answer questions about the clusters.

Dr. Gibbons said a lot of the concern for the cluster boards has come from aided schools — St. George's Preparatory, Berkeley Institute, Whitney Institute and Sandys Secondary.

"There's always quite a bit of concern expressed by the boards of the aided schools. One of the concerns was by Hopkins standards, the aided schools were doing better. In many cases they have a good strong board. I think the issue for a lot of us was that there was certainly no problem in having regular meetings taking place with the middle schools and primary schools so that there was good communication going on.

"You need that kind of regular communication."

He continued: "I don't think anybody had a problem with regular meetings.

"I think there the concern was the concept of having a cluster board where we had one board who's maybe dealing with five, six or seven schools.

"What we found is it's difficult enough to pay attention and deal with the issues of a single school but when you have a concept, when you're trying to provide governance to five, six or seven schools, you lose the individual touch and focus and that was the major concern."

Dr. Gibbons said the senior schools — Berkeley Institute and Cedarbridge Academy — were given permission to have their own boards.

He said schools having their own boards is beneficial because they provide governance at a local level and gave a suggestion as to why the cluster boards haven't come to light.

"I think the concern that the ministry had if I recall, that they felt they might not be able to get enough board members to get boards."

Dr. Gibbons said the aided schools seemed to be performing better than non-aided schools and talked about a study in the UK.

"There have been some situations in the UK where they have paired up a school that's performing very well with another school that's not doing very well.

"That really helps. They can discuss different techniques and dealing with disciplinary issues. But I think it's very rare indeed where you get any more than a couple of schools that get this pairing thing.

"Then your talking about more than two, it gets complicated. You might as well be the ministry. It's going to be very challenging with everybody. It's the issue of not moving forward in the right direction."