Public school principals told yesterday of their dissatisfaction and disaffection with educational reform during a historic meeting of a new parliamentary committee.

The Joint Education Select Committee opened its doors to the public and press for the first time, becoming the first parliamentary committee in Bermuda to do so in the process.

Committee chairman Neletha Butterfield said the decision to open up the meetings showed "history is turning". "It's important to go public because we have to show transparency, openness and honesty," she said.

The Royal Gazette's A Right to Know: Giving People Power campaign and the British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee have called this year for parliamentary committees to meet in public.

Yesterday's two-and-a-quarter-hour session in the Senate Chamber in Cabinet House attracted a large audience, mainly made up of educators who listened intently as four representatives from the Association of School Principals (ASP) spoke.

The cross-party committee, tasked with reporting back to Parliament on the implementation of ten recommendations in last year's Hopkins Report on public schools, invited the ASP to give its views on the reform.

The consensus from the four head teachers was that principals have been excluded from the process, are sceptical about the Ministry of Education's "scattershot" approach to bringing in new initiatives and have yet to see a strategic plan on improving the public education system.

Carole Figueiredo, from West Pembroke Primary School, said the Ministry didn't seem to have prioritised its approach to improving teaching standards, instead just overloading educators with new ideas and methods.

The first seven recommendations were supposed to have been implemented in the last school year but weren't, she said, meaning "everything is being pushed into this year".

Mrs. Figueiredo said principals were being told how they were going to be improved but "there has been no real collaboration".

"Our members believe, to quote one of our members, that there is a lack of respect and a lack of communication from the Ministry to ASP members," she said.

"There is a great gulf between the work in central office and the work that goes on day-to-day in our schools," she said, adding that while principals were to be constantly evaluated as part of the reform, it was not clear who would be evaluating the growing number of staff at the Ministry.

Newly appointed ASP president Lisa Smith, headmaster at Harrington Sound Primary, said principals, teachers and students were working hard but were without clear goals from the top.

Both women — along with Whitney Institute Middle School principal Freddie Evans and CedarBridge Academy principal Kalmar Richards — said children were still not being tested on the curriculum and it had still not been aligned across the system.

Dr. Evans said the ASP felt its complaints about the curriculum — and the grievance it filed against former education permanent secretary Rosemary Tyrrell regarding the issue in 2006 — were the catalyst for the current reform.

But he said it had consistently been left out of the process since, and claimed that the Ministry's inertia and failure to set targets affected everyone. "Right now, without that articulation it becomes, for us, the flavour of the month or scattershot approach," he said.

Mrs. Richards said the lack of a strategic plan from those implementing the reform was "cause for grave concern".

n Anyone wanting to submit comments to the committee shouldsend an email to: jsceducation@gov.bm.

The committee next meets at 1 p.m. on Wednesday at the Senate Chamber.