Education Minister Randy Horton yesterday defended the spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars on overseas consultants, insisting they were needed to help transform public schools.

Mr. Horton told The Royal Gazette: "These are people who have actually done it before, who have done it over and over and over before."

Trade unionists raised concerns earlier this week about the number of foreign consultants hired to help implement the recommendations in last year's Hopkins report.

Anthony Wolffe, president of Bermuda Trade Unions Congress, told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday that if local stakeholders, including principals and teachers, had been consulted on education reform from the beginning there would be no need for expensive consultants. "We have educators right here," he said. "We have 900 'consultants' within the public school system."

Mr. Horton gave this newspaper a breakdown of recent spending on foreign consultants, arguing that it was "money well spent".

He said UK-based consultancy ISOS had been brought in to "crystallise" a five-year strategic plan for educational reform, at a one-off cost of $60,000. They were given the contract in place of a full-time strategic planner being appointed.

Half of their fee will be paid for by taxpayers and half by private sector companies, including Bank of Bermuda. Richard Page-Jones and Nathalie Parish, from ISOS, are expected to deliver the plan in January. Helping them as an independent assessor is Peter Matthews, who was part of the Hopkins team.

Mr. Horton said Dr. Matthews would be paid about $6,000, which is included in the $60,000 mentioned above. The Minister said David Hopkins, the professor who led last year's review of public schools, was recently paid $30,000 for additional work.

US educational association Phi Delta Kappa has been hired to conduct a curriculum audit, also due to be delivered in January, at a cost of $180,000.

Mr. Horton said the cost of flying all the consultants to the Island and providing accommodation was probably in the region of $12,000. "I think we have made significant progress and I think there are many positives that have come out of the work we have put into the reform at this point," he said.

Spending by the Ministry of Education on consultants also includes $250,000-a-year to US education expert Henry Johnson, the consultant executive officer for education and acting education commissioner.

Dr. Johnson, who came here last September and will stay until next June, receives monthly round-trip business class airfare to the States, $6,100-a-month rent, utility expenses up to $500 per month and a freight allowance of $3,100. Last year, in response to parliamentary questions, Mr. Horton said the Hopkins report cost $240,000, half of which was funded by the Bank of Bermuda, and that the review team were paid just under $145,000.

Earlier this year, further parliamentary answers showed that consultant Anthony Witherspoon was on a $20,000-a-month contract for three years from July 2005 to August 2008 as part of an academic monitoring and character development mentoring programme.

He received round-trip economy airfare and a freight allowance. The Ministry of Education also employs local consultants, according to the parliamentary answers. They include communications liaison officer Scott Simmons, on just over $80,000 a year; comptroller Indranie Jagmohan, on almost $137,000 and IT project manager Norman Dill, on just over $70,000.