This response document is presented by the PTA Executive committees of St. David’s Primary and St. George’s Preparatory and other members of the community of St. George’s. It is supported by its key stakeholders, including parents and guardians, teachers, and other wider community members, as evidenced by the signatures gathered here.
It is presented in response to the 2021 “Consultation on a Proposal for the Introduction of Parish Primary Schools” (“the Parish Proposal”). The PTA Executives of each of the three St. George’s Primary Schools have reviewed this document, and will submit school specific comments relevant to their particular parent groups.
There is no denying that Bermuda’s public education system is in need of significant reform. Since the late 1980’s there have been many attempts at reform; reports have been commissioned, blueprints and plans have been implemented, but improvements have been marginal at best. As the world’s education systems evolved and improved, Bermuda and its children have fallen further and further behind. Today’s children will become the cornerstone of tomorrow’s economy, and so the success of our education system will impact every facet of our Island. The time is now - we cannot afford to delay but, perhaps more importantly, we cannot afford to get it wrong.
It is almost impossible today for residents of Bermuda to understand how our schools are performing – against each other, against plan, and against international benchmarks. The severe lack of transparency, accountability and leadership in Bermuda, highlighted in the Hopkins Report 2007, is still as much of a problem now as it was almost 14 years ago - and it is not as a result of inadequate funding. With an average spend of $30,615 per child, the pubic school spend per student is 27% greater than even the most expensive private school on the island.
After thorough review and discussion, we believe the considerable shortcomings of the Parish Proposal will be fundamentally problematic, and will almost certainly inhibit any kind of successful reform. Furthermore, we believe the proposal lacks sufficient detail for any person to make an informed decision to support. For example, although the Parish Proposal highlights that successful education reform needs to address shortcomings in teacher performance, the curriculum, assessment frameworks and accreditation models, it fails to address any of these issues.
Globally, fiscal responsibility has never been more important, and the Parish Proposal does not reveal how this reform is to be funded. We estimate the building cost alone could be as high as $207m. It is unclear who the author of the Parish Proposal is, what experience they have in this field, and how qualified they are to be providing advice on such an impactful motion.
What is highlighted in our report is a necessity to revisit the consultation process, to include meaningful feedback from the community at each step of the proposed changes. We aspire to have the appropriate professionals in place to guide and oversee the process from start to finish. We must start with a real consultation - a legally, morally acceptable, unbiased process whose outcome drives the building blocks of a much more considered approach to school reform. We must collect sufficient quantitative data, that for perhaps the first time, truly allows us to understand how our schools are performing today And we suggest using that data to develop an implementation plan
that is methodical, strategic, targeted and flexible. A plan that builds upon what exists today and works
systematically to improve, as opposed to discarding altogether.
It is common practice in other education systems in the world to build on what works and use frameworks that are strategically designed to incrementally improve. We are confident that our suggestions will not only generate increased stakeholder confidence but also do a better job of meeting the many and complex objectives of education reform, and will ultimately improve the quality of public education in Bermuda. In the short term, this may mean taking a step back – but for long-term success, it is imperative that we ensure we are building on a solid foundation. We cannot afford to fail our children, again.
The Parish Proposal centers education reform around the quality of the school buildings - a rationale that is misaligned with both the plethora of research on this well-travelled road, and the Hopkins recommendations of 2007, which were presented to Bermuda by some of the leading faces of effective education.
The Parish Proposal adopts a one-size-fits-all approach applied across arbitrary geographical boundaries that would require the education system to essentially be rebuilt from the ground up. It would disadvantage those children that are in successful primary schools today, and goes against the typical approach taken to improvement - one of looking towards a system's successes and working out how to build on those.
As a public sector initiative, the Parish Proposal demonstrates a lack of proper consultation. It fails to meet both the basic principles of effective consultation, as well as the legal requirements that
stipulate consultation must occur when proposals are still in a formative stage. It is well understood that a lack of proper consultation results in less-informed decision making, lesser satisfaction from stakeholders with the outcome, and, most critically, a lesser chance of successful implementation. This is a complicated undertaking.
Education reform should not be about re-inventing the wheel. We demonstrate in our report that it is possible to streamline our Primary School system in a more strategic manner - focusing on keeping
school sizes small, and class sizes at 20 children or under which aligns with academic research whilst achieving the same efficiency metrics.
We believe wholeheartedly that we should be examining our current successes and replicating where we can. We recommend leveraging a pilot scheme before plunging head-first into nation-wide reform and we advocate learning, adapting, and improving from the results. For example, aided school models (and similar Academy and Charter models in the UK and US respectively) have grown in popularity in recent years, as their governance structure is widely accepted to drive accountability and teacher performance, and thus positively impact academic achievement.
We encourage the leverage of these successes for our children. We need to focus on tried-and-tested strategies that have been successfully delivered.
