The education changes proposed by Professor Steven Hopkins and his review team make sense and deserve support, with a number of qualifications.

If nothing else, the team deserves credit for having listened, because the criticisms of the system, and the proposed changes, have been around for many years, and have been ignored for about as long.

The Opposition has made the point, with some justice, that many of these changes have been proposed by the United Bermuda Party in the past five or six years, and that the six Ministers who have headed the Education Ministry since the Progressive Labour Party took power in 1998 should take some accountability. This is inarguable, but it might have been better politics for the UBP to say they were glad the Government had finally taken its advice and now it’s time to get on with the job.

Indeed, given the scope of the reforms, this might be the ideal time to take education out of the political sphere and put it in the hands of a quango; the results of the review show that the politicians and senior civil servants of the last decade or so have proven themselves incapable of running anything approaching a decent education system.

Having said that, and assuming that politicians will be unable to resist interfering, it must be emphasised that the devil of these reforms is in the details, and so far no one outside of a very small magic circle has seen anything more than the one hour TV presentation and a five page summary of the review.

So there are a good many unanswered questions about the review, without which the reforms will be meaningless. So far, it is now known who should be running the new education authority, or what powers they will have.

Nor is it clear what standards will be applied when students are tested, nor how and when principals and teachers will be assessed, and what powers there will be to move or fire educators who are not up to the task.

There is very little detail on how the new school federations will be structured or what powers they will have. So there is a huge amount of work to be done. Cynics will say that if the fiasco of the TV presentation is anything to go by, then implementation of the actual reforms is likely to be a dog’s breakfast. That may be a little unfair, but implementation is absolutely key, and it is to be hoped that Thursday night’s shambles does not become a symbol of this latest attempt to get education right.

What should not be done is to cherry pick these reforms. They have been put together as an interlocking package and to try to implement one relatively easy part (elected school boards) while ignoring harder parts (firing the senior officials in the now thoroughly discredited Education Department) will lead to disaster.

But that may well be what happens. Dr. Hopkins has said he believes school results and performance should be published because that is the only way to hold principals and administrators accountable.

But there is tremendous internal resistance to this, and the refusal of the review team itself and the government to say what schools the team considered to be “good” — let alone those that are performing poorly — is a bad sign. So, yes, these reforms finally suggest that the Government is getting serious about education, and there is good reason to believe that, if implemented properly, they will quickly result in improved performance.

But much more information is needed before they can be given unqualified support.