Chairman of Bermuda College Jan Spiring last night said new student targets are soon to be announced with the first addressing the poor attrition rate - which currently stands at 50 percent.

He promises that faculty and support staff would be accountable to the Island and said the first target would be released in a matter of weeks to improve student success.

He said it was important that people realised that the college fully accepted improvements needed to be made and it would therefore be completely open with any targets and their results.

He said the first target would be to reduce the number of students who dropped out of courses, were lost along the way, or were thrown out because of lack of commitment and results.

At the moment, he said, about half of students were lost throughout the courses and everyone at the college believed things could be done to make improvements.

He said even if it meant remedial students had to do an additional year, the college wanted to see everyone succeed.

However, Mr. Spiring would not reveal, at this stage, what the new target would be or just how it was going to be achieved.

He said a number of ideas were being looked at, but one was to organise students into groups, so they work together as a team to be successful.

He said: "If a student is not handing in assignments or meeting other requirements that would enable the college to monitor whether or not they are going to be successful, members of the group would then speak to the individual. They would be letting the team down. It would be one way of encouraging and pushing students.

"In time, we will be setting different targets for different things, but we feel this is the best place to start. We have a very high attrition rate and we want to do something about that. We want our students to stay and be successful."

He said those students that make it to universities overseas are of a very high standard, but said more needed to be done to ensure that more students got that far.

Mr. Spiring spoke out after it was revealed that an independent report into the college had described the college as "foundering".

The college board had asked that the audit be carried out, and it was paid for by the Education ministry.

Mr. Spiring said the board wanted to make changes for the better and wanted the report as a basis for those changes.

And he said nothing in it really surprised him - many of the 25 recommendations were about to be addressed, anyway.

He added: "There was nothing that surprised me. There are some things I don't agree with, but nothing surprised me."