An open meeting of a new parliamentary select committee on education will take place tomorrow — with the public and press able to attend for the first time.

The cross-party committee will meet in the Senate Chamber at Cabinet House at 1 p.m. Open committee meetings will be held in the same venue at the same time on October 29 and November 5, after which the venue will change.

Speaker Stanley Lowe announced last month that the landmark decision to open up the Joint Selection Committee on Education had been made by Parliament's Rules and Privileges Committee.

He told the House of Assembly that the issue of whether all parliamentary committees should meet in public, as called for by this newspaper's A Right To Know: Giving People Power campaign and the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, would be decided soon.

The education committee is opening its doors on a trial basis, a move committee chairman Neletha Butterfield said was to be welcomed.

"We will be the first and it was very important that we did go to the Speaker — I myself personally went — because education is very important," she told this newspaper. "I believe that the public should be involved."

The bipartisan committee aims to produce a report for Parliament by next month on how successfully the ten key recommendations in the 2007 Hopkins report on public schools have been implemented.