The Education Ministry is today holding a mass meeting of everyone involved in education to ?catch the vision ?of an improved public education system. No one would dispute that improving education should be a top priority for the community.

Last month in an interview with , Ms Tyrrell admitted the current performance levels were not good enough. She added: ?We can?t keep doing things as we have been. Our greatest challenge is to identify what those changes that need to be made are and be more deliberate in making those changes. I don?t think that anybody is satisfied. I don?t know that anyone is satisfied with the end result. We work together to sort that out.?

Among the topics to be examined are: restoring confidence in public education, respecting diversity, intentional expectations for the Ministry, relationship building and effective communication. All of those areas are important and all in theory, should go some way to improving public schools.

But they seem to miss the main point. Confidence in public education has declined because results have fallen. The reasons for that are many, but the fact is that confidence will only improve when performance does.

And in the end, performance comes down to having motivated staff and motivated students who want to be at school and want to learn. That is more important than whether you have new buildings, whether you have middle schools and high schools or schools which teach children from five to 18. It is more important than whether a school is co-ed or single sex.

One factor does affect performance, and that is selection. Schools that can select their students have a built-in advantage over schools that must admit everyone, and one reason why performance tends to decline in the public school system when children move from primary schools to middle schools is because the best primary school children move to private schools at the age of 11.

There is not a lot that the public system can do about that, but Stuart Hayward?s column on this page shows that even schools that cannot choose their students can succeed, just as the late and long lamented Bermuda Technical Institute did. ?Tech? largely took rejects and largely turned out very successful graduates. So it?s not impossible.

Tech did it, first and foremost, because it had inspired and inspiring teachers who were able to make learning a pleasure. It is likely that Tech?s teachers were largely left to get on with it, and they did.

The first thing the Ministry of Education should do if it wants to improve performance in the public schools is to get out of the way. It should set the curriculum, performance standards and basic disciplinary framework, the minimum qualifications for principals and teachers and it should then leave the schools to get on with it.

Ideally, each school should have its own board to which the principal would report, but in the absence of that, the Ministry should hold the schools accountable for performance. Principals and staffs who succeed should be rewarded and schools that fail to make the grade should be held accountable. In some cases, they should be given additional resources and in others the principal should be replaced.

But the main thing is to give good principals ? and many of Bermuda?s public school principals are first class ? the chance to succeed.