Education and Development Minister Terry Lister is shaking things up ? starting with a revision of the code of conduct, improving the assessment programme and investing heavily in professional development of teachers.

It is aimed, he said, at improving student performance.

Mr. Lister has even taken principals to task, asking them to improve supervision of their teachers? work and starting a new school-based teacher support programme at primary level as well as developing a system-wide tutorial policy.

The comments came on the heels of the publication of the most recent Terra Nova results last week which showed Bermuda?s primary level students were performing better on average than their North American peers. But modest to disappointing results in middle and senior levels sent up a red flag.

He said: ?We are concerned about the overall performance of our students at the middle and senior levels. We are also concerned about those students who are not performing at an acceptable standards at the Primary level.?

While parental involvement was one of the areas over which the Ministry exercised less control, it was still willing to do what it could to support parents with parental support programmes provided by the Ministry and individual schools.

One such programme is currently running at CedarBridge and so far 120 parents have registered for these seminars.

Twenty planned workshops for the Parenting Seminars Series were scheduled and this month will focus on character building, preparing for scholarship applications and dealing with situations which interfere with the process of education.

These include substance abuse, eating disorders and delinquent behaviour.

At the Primary level a series of workshops at the Youth Library for parents and students is helping parents understand how to use children?s literature to make mathematics more meaningful. Mr. Lister said some parents were failing their children through sheer irresponsibility and needed to take advantage of some of these opportunities.

Starting next year, the Ministry of Education will have in place a revised assessment programme which will make it virtually impossible for any student, besides those with extreme learning difficulties, to be exempted from testing.

This, Mr. Lister said, would improve the integrity of the year-to-year comparability of Terra Nova results.

This revised assessment programme will in part be developed by Senior Education Officer Dr. Craig Nikolai.

Mr. Lister added that the online curriculum programme which was piloted by Whitney Institute Middle School, has now been rolled out to all public middle schools.

This programme, he said, would free up teachers to concentrate on individual student needs. ?I have also directed senior Ministry staff to develop and implement a scheduling initiative which will ensure that every middle school student receives a specific minimum number of hours of instruction in the core curriculum areas.?

Starting this year, the Ministry of Education has initiated a school-based instructional support programme at the primary level where teachers will benefit from direct support in IT and English Language Arts, three days a term.

Mr. Lister said this was done in order to improve instruction in the classroom.

?I have directed the Curriculum Instruction and Leadership Team to increase the in-school presence of professionals with expertise in specific subject areas such as mathematics,? he said, adding that this was done with the aim of providing more frequent direct support to teachers.