The Ministry of Education last week held a series of public meetings to unveil its strategy for the future of public education.

That's good, because a plan for raising standards and restoring confidence in public schools is needed. To succeed, it has to involve administrators, teachers, parents and members of the community such as employers and the leaders of organisations dedicated to helping children.

So far, it seems to be off to a bumpy start, with teachers not taking part because they do not have a new agreement. That is wrong of the teachers; if they care about the system they work in, they should be involved in this process, which is separate from a new contract.

Without a commitment from everyone involved in education, this plan will fail.

At the meetings last week, it would appear that nuts and bolts issues predominated. One parent raised the problem of children not being able to take home textbooks because there are not enough to go around.

Similarly, the recent establishment of the alternative school is a good example of the failure of the public system. The alternative school itself has received wide support; but the actual setting up of the school was poorly done. Parents and children were only informed at the last minute of where they were going, uniforms weren't ready and so on.

A good place for any strategy to begin would be within the Department of Education itself, once memorably described as "the Kremlin" by the late David Critchley. The Department's inability to successfully get the alternative school up and running is indicative of the problem, as a is a "meeting" culture rather than a "decision culture".

What is not needed is a wholesale change in the current system. Many of the changes of recent years need to be more firmly rooted, not replaced with the latest great idea. Smaller classes and the alternative schools are both good changes which were needed to refine the current system.

Areas the strategy should look at are how to decentralise the system further, giving principals the power to administer their schools as best they can, and how to reduce administrative costs so that students can do things as simple as take their text books home so they can do their homework. Getting the basics right, whether it is having sufficient textbooks, or ensuring that students have a basic grasp of English and maths, may be the most important thing for Bermuda education now.