The Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) says it is not clear how management consultant Dr Franklin Johnston plans to go about eliminating waste at the Ministry of Education.

Johnston, who was seeking to defend his role as a senior adviser to Education Minister Ronald Thwaites, was reported in The Sunday Gleaner yesterday as saying that his core function required him to go where no other education official in Jamaica has gone in a bid to trim the waste.

"Everything that does not work well will be made to work well or abandoned, and everything that works well is to be improved," Johnston said, noting that his focus would be on the corporate side of the education ministry.

However, for the JLP's spokes-person on education, Marisa Dalrymple-Philibert, Johnston's comments raise several questions.

"Do the cuts he speaks of form part of the ongoing transformation process, or are they part of an exercise to downsize the education ministry due to fiscal considerations?" she asked.

Dalrymple-Philibert noted that Johnston gave no timelines and said some of the issues he raised required a legislative review "as to the powers of the minister".

In addition, she said there were other areas where Johnston promised to take a zero-tolerance approach, but asserted that some of them were "beyond his reach".

"(For example) parental indifference ... how will that be tackled?" she asked.

"So far, this $6-million consultant has not saved the Ministry of Education his worth in salary," she added.