The Families in Crisis forum showed a need for updating local clinical social workers on the latest techniques in dealing with family problems, Ms Simmons said.

"They needed new tools to properly address the problems they are seeing,'' she explained.

A large number of Government and private practice social workers and counsellors attended the conference, she noted.

"We have had numerous calls of thanks today from participants and the evaluation forms they filled out showed nothing but high ratings,'' said Ms Simmons.

Guest speaker Dr. Jannah Hurn also received high praise from the roughly 100 participants for her workshops on tackling family break-ups and working with divorcing couples, step families and single parents.

Dr. Hurn is the Dean of the Social Work School at Florida State University.

She said at the forum that Bermuda did not appear to be doing enough to address its high number of divorces and single parents.

She urged Bermuda's "over-burdened'' social workers to fight for more resources and law changes to make their jobs easier.

Summing up one workshop, she told social workers: "You need more resources -- more school home counsellors, more family intervention and treatment programmes, more reasonably priced day care, more programmes to give children male role models ...'' One of the earlier speakers, West End school home counsellor Ms Marilyn Smith had pointed out she had to deal with being the only counsellor for around 300 children in the public school system.

"Obviously one counsellor per three schools is just not adequate,'' she said.

"The community has to put pressure in the right places to see it expanded.'' Ms Simmons said the Council's members would meet today to discuss the conference and would be making a statement afterwards.

The Council was formed two years ago to regulate the growing number of clinical social workers. It also aims to promote social research in Bermuda to better address social ills.

And it seeks to promote professional development in the field. A first step in that direction was the setting up of a national certificate exam at Bermuda College starting in June, 1994.