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There are homes that have real issues and I know the teachers see it every day. Children coming to school who haven’t had breakfast, who are totally spaced-out, who are stressed-out because of what they’ve seen in their home, whether it is their parent smoking marijuana or the husband beating up his wife. And when they go to school, they cannot perform.

There was an initiative that came up here when Paula Cox was the Minister of Education, that was going to hold parents accountable. Their parents had to come into the school a certain number of times to talk to the teachers about their child. Is that happening? How many parents are participating? Are we getting help for parents?

Whatever the issue is, the children are not to blame. It is either the parents, the teacher, the Minister in the church, whoever is not helping that child that is the problem.

That is the problem and our role as adults and mentors is to help these children, and our role as MPs is to devise a system that works.

And we have to stop looking at whatever is new. I went to this forum and I’m hearing something new — that our children need to have an Afro-centric education. Now, what does that mean? I have no idea what it means and besides, this country is made up of children of all different races and no particular group is more important than the other. Not one person is more important than the other.

Now, we know that, as a consequence of colonialism, racism and all sorts of –isms that certain people were left out of the system. But we are correcting all of that. And we need to be preparing our students to compete globally. So, all of this stuff about black... I mean, get over it. The time is to look at all of our children because they are all equally important.

We keep looking at something new to try to fix it when we have the tools already in place, we just need the people who are committed enough to do it.

To recognise, firstly, that there is a problem and say, “Oops...hello...I’m in charge of this school and I recognise it is a problem”.

It’s odd that we never want to give the results of individual schools. We never want to say, for example, East End is performing at this level, Francis Patton at whatever level and so on.

And when we became the Government, I said, “publish the figures, the public needs to know”. What was the answer? The same answer the UBP had, I’m sure, “Well, you know, people will get upset, the children will feel badly about themselves if you say that their school’s not doing as well as another school”.

But already the perception exists that if you go to public school you’re inferior so the mentality is already there. The point of giving out results is to hold teachers and principals accountable for the performance of their school.

And perhaps if School B is doing better than School A, perhaps we could say to the headmistress and the teacher, ‘go up and see what A is doing and what your people aren’t doing. Let’s see what we can learn.’

We all know that some primary schools, for example, are performing better than others. Put the information out there; let the parents hold the school and the teachers accountable.

Publish the figures in the paper. Put up websites. You can go in any country in the world and look and see what their schools are doing but in Bermuda we have a problem with it.

Stop covering up for everybody. We have a culture in this country that everybody covers up for everybody else and it creates mediocrity like I have never seen. You hold somebody accountable, they go running off to their union, the union backs them, the headmistress wants to sanction this teacher, this teacher’s not performing, the other teachers rally all around them because if she points her out maybe it’s me the next time.

I hear stories from principals about the level of some of the teaching and even the teachers... teachers can’t even write properly in some instances. How are they supposed to teach if they can’t write and express themselves properly? We know this. We saw it when the teachers marched on Parliament; we saw the behaviour of our teachers — we know what we have. We need to fix it.

We don’t have enough male teachers in the system. We have only about 18 per cent male teachers in the system.

We need more male teachers because in many instances male children don’t have a father presence. To then not have a male presence in the school can cause difficulty; these young men start acting out and we don’t know why.

In the absence of male teachers, let the women teachers be held accountable and do their best to empower our male children.

So, there are issues, but we have the money to put the resources in place and unless we have measurement systems in place at all levels — teachers, schools, parents, the Department of Education — we will continue to have problems and it does not matter who the government is.

I know that there are some teachers out there who are really trying and getting frustrated at what they see other teachers doing and at the performance of their school.

These people need to be uplifted and to be able to hold their fellow teacher accountable.

One of the roles of a backbencher in the Westminster system is to hold his own Government accountable. That is the role of the backbench. I am not in the Cabinet so it’s not collective responsibility in that sense but I would have had the same conversation that I’m having now, in the Cabinet. What comes out of Cabinet at the end of those conversations is collective responsibility. I have to support it, shut up or get out. It’s very simple. When you’re in the Cabinet, you have to either go along or get out. However, when you’re on the backbench, you have the pleasure, and sometimes the displeasure, of saying what you think. The Minister knows what I’m going to say, it’s not like he has heard anything new. He doesn’t take it personally; he knew exactly what I was going to say when I got up.

We all have to be held accountable; we all have to help where we can within our own immediate sphere: relatives, nieces, nephews, whomever. We have to lift those teachers who are trying their best so that they are not so “frustrated and disgusted” that they leave the system and go to the private sector. We have seen so many good teachers leave.

We need to make them know that they are important and they are going to work in an environment where everybody is held accountable and so you don’t have some teacher in P3 having a wonderful class and all of a sudden at the end of P4, what happened to the kids? Well, they had a new teacher and something happened to the kids.

We have too many who are mediocre teachers and we have to weed them out and ensure that if we’re spending $100 million plus and if principals are making over $100,000 teachers are making $70,000 we need to make sure they are earning their money and that the education system is successful and that our students are faring well. If the economy continues to grow we are not going to have the children ready to fulfil these jobs if they aren’t even able to read and write and construct a proper resume to apply for a job.

If when it’s necessary, we have to go elsewhere to bring in some teachers then so be it because our children are too important to leave them to the hands of those who are not committed to education and not committed to ensuring that each and every one of our children are educated to the best of their ability.

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