The shake-up of public schools in the wake of the Hopkins Report will result in redundancies within Government.

At a meeting of the education reform team with The Royal Gazette, Education Minister Randolph Horton confirmed: "There will be a significant shake-up of staff."

He could not however, say how many civil servants would lose their jobs. Dr. Henry Johnson, Consultant Executive Officer, said: "All of it has not been fleshed out yet."

The Interim Executive Board is currently drawing up the final blueprint for the overhaul of the Education Ministry, but has already ruled out taking on any extra staff.

A major shake-up will be the creation of three Departments, Academics, Business, and Standards and Accountability, with individual Directors to head them. Government is to advertise these positions over the next few weeks, and the restructuring of support staff will then follow.

Dr. Johnson, said: "The changes are based on what we identified as the major functional roles to support our core mission – to focus on improving teaching and learning.

"The functions that support that are Academics, Business, and Standards and Accountability. So the structure and responsibilities for each of those is going to be headed by a Director.

"The job descriptions for the current positions are being written and the advertisements for the three Directors should be released in a week or so. So we are eagerly anticipating applications."

It is just over a year since the Hopkins Report called for a "radical overhaul" of the Ministry of Education. UK Professor David Hopkins and his review team – tasked with finding out why more than half the Island's senior school students were failing to graduate – described the Ministry as "poorly-led and mismanaged" and "secretive".

Among ten recommendations to reform Bermuda's public education system were the sacking of senior Ministry staff and bringing in a temporary external executive board to oversee a "major restructuring".

The Interim Executive Board was established last year but there have been no signs of any job losses within the Ministry — until now.

Dr. Johnson said: "At best there was loose evaluation and accountability (within the Ministry) so we've set up a more hierarchical structure than the current flatter organisation.

"We need to design what support structures are needed to handle those functions (Academics, Business, Standards and Accountability), but there is some broad notion that we don't need to add staff, but only work within the current number."

Interim Executive Board chairman, Bank of Bermuda CEO Philip Butterfield added: "That can only be done once the leadership is established."

The team aims to push the reforms through in amendments to the 1996 Education Act this summer. Mr. Horton said: "If that is completed by the end of July, implementation should be in September."

General secretary of the Bermuda Public Services Union, Ed Ball, said yesterday: "No formal representation has been made as yet to the BPSU with respect to any redundancies. But anyone who is a union members has a right to union representation."

As for school teachers and principals, the new emphasis on accountability means their jobs are dependant on the exam results of their pupils.

At a public meeting at the World Heritage Centre in St. George's earlier this month, Mr. Horton said: "What the accountability system will do is, the teachers not performing, we will know about them. If they are not performing well, we will have in place measures to ensure they reach the standard they should, and at the end of the day if they don't reach that standard they will be asked to leave the system. "That also includes principals," he said.

President of the Bermuda Union of Teachers, Keisha Douglas, was unavailable for comment yesterday.