Teachers and parents have to share the blame for the Island's poor standards in reading, Opposition leader Pamela Gordon said yesterday.

And Ms Gordon defended her party's record on education while in Government.

Ms Gordon said: "You can provide funding to ensure there are enough teachers and policy and direction to make sure that standards are acceptable.

"But if teachers don't follow policy and direction, I would say that some accountability must rest with those who are teaching the children.'' Ms Gordon spoke out after claims that schoolchildren are failing to make the grade in basic English and maths.

And ex-school principal turned PLP MP Dale Butler said the previous Government had "ignored'' the problem.

But Ms Gordon said: "It concerns me when you have people saying they tried to bring this to the attention of the previous Government and it did nothing, when in fact literacy belongs in the classroom and at home.'' She added: "It's irresponsible to attempt to say the previous Government didn't care when you look at the millions of dollars put into education through education restructuring and the education planning team which came from our community. These were the people who made recommendations to the United Bermuda Party Government and through these suggestions some of the reforms came about.'' Ms Gordon said it was not helpful for critics to give the impression that "the whole Country is a failure and everything is out of control''.

She added: "When you look at the number of senior Civil Servants who are Bermudian and the number of teachers who have gone through our educational system, we might not have it perfectly right, but we identified the problems.

"The issue of literacy was addressed and addressed and we put programmes in place to deal with specifics.'' On last Monday's Labour Day holiday, Bermuda Union of Teachers president Anthony Wolffe said that at one unnamed middle school, only seven out of 126 pupils had reached the required reading standard.