A clearer picture of the number of students graduating from public schools is needed and will be provided in future years, according to the man tasked with improving Bermuda's education system.

Henry Johnson, the Government's new consultant executive officer for education, told that the way results are currently presented to the public — resulting this year in a claim from Education Minister Randy Horton that more than three-quarters of students achieved a Bermuda School Certificate — could be masking a grimmer reality.

Mr. Horton said last week that 80 percent of the 213 students who enrolled in the final senior four (S4) year of school in 2006 graduated this summer.

But many education experts now believe that a more accurate way of calculating the pass rate is to divide the number of students who start out in senior one (or ninth grade in the States) by the number of graduates four years later. The US government has said schools should report their results this way.

Dr. Johnson, a former education secretary in US president George Bush's administration, said: "That's a more accurate picture. That's a more accurate, more realistic number. I'm not sure that that's what we are doing now but I believe that that's the direction we are going in. I think the Minister is comfortable with that."

He added: "That's the position that the US federal government took: that in order to be more accurate you needed to hold that ninth grade number constant."

Mr. Horton said in January that the Education Ministry was to change the way it analysed the figures and would eventually be able to report how many students completed the four-year S1 to S4 programme.

He said weaknesses in data collection would not make that possible until 2009. This year, the Ministry has not made public the number of students who began in S1 at the two public senior schools in 2003.

But figures previously released to this newspaper show a shocking rate of attrition from CedarBridge Academy and the Berkeley Institute. In 2000 there were 444 S1 students but only 124 graduates four years later.

In 2001, there were 414 S1 pupils and 125 graduates in 2005. In 2002, 394 started out in S1; four years later just 160 graduates walked away with graduation certificates.

The number of students making it to S4 appears to be dropping dramatically, based on last week's figures. In 2005, 309 students began the final year. But last year, there were just 213.

Dr. Johnson, who was brought here on two-year contract after a damning review of the education system was published earlier this year, said his preferred method of reporting the graduation rate would help to track what was happening to students who failed to make it to S4."I don't know why there is almost 100 fewer students this year," he said. "Some of those kids might have transferred, some might have decided to leave, some could have gone on to get educated elsewhere."This conversation about how does one measure accurately the graduation rate and the dropout rate is one we are having in Bermuda right now."He said that his two months on the Island had not led him to believe that the Minister, education permanent secretary or Ministry staff were trying to hide anything.A spokesman for the Education Minister said Mr. Horton would address the statistics at a press conference tomorrow.