Cayman’s government schools have some genuinely good news.

Reading outcomes in government primary schools have risen 18.4 percentage points since 2022. Grammar, punctuation and spelling increased from 58% to 68% over three years. Mathematics reached 51% in 2025, 9 percentage points higher than in 2022.

The improvement among older pupils is more striking. In 2025, 52.9% of Year 11 students achieved at least five subject passes including English and mathematics, up from 40.2% a year earlier, a 12.7-percentage-point jump in a single cohort. Among students who sat at least five subjects, 45.4% achieved seven or more passes including English and mathematics, against 34.3% in 2024.

“Strong reading and language skills are essential for success across all subjects,” Chief Officer Cetonya Cacho said. “The progress we are seeing reflects more consistent teaching practices and a sustained focus on literacy across our schools.”

The numbers show improvement.

What they don't settle is the more important question: improvement against what?

For two of its headline measures, the Ministry of Education & Training chose 2022 as the starting line.

That was no ordinary starting line.

The COVID baseline

The pupils being assessed in 2022 had been educated through the most disruptive period for Cayman schools in recent history.

The Office of Education Standards found that many pupils had missed considerable face-to-face school time during the pandemic. The Omicron wave contributed to absences, attendance was affected by concerns about community transmission and some schools specifically reported lost progress in mathematics. Only 60% of government-school staff surveyed by inspectors said pupils were making acceptable progress during the pandemic.

That doesn't invalidate 2022 as a comparison. It makes the comparison more complicated.

An 18.4-percentage-point increase from a COVID-affected period is a real improvement in the measured result. But it may contain two things: improvement produced by better teaching and intervention, and recovery of learning lost or slowed during the pandemic.

Both could be true.

The report doesn't tell us how much is one and how much is the other.

That leaves an important counterfactual: Where would Cayman’s pupils be today if COVID had never happened?

No education department can know that precisely. But longer-term trends, consistent assessments and external benchmarks can help establish whether today's results represent recovery to an expected trajectory or performance beyond it.

That distinction doesn't diminish the work of teachers or pupils. It determines what the numbers actually prove.

Reading is up. Writing is still weak

The headline reading improvement also sits beside a much less comfortable literacy number.

Only 45% of pupils met the national benchmark in writing, which the ministry itself describes as the most challenging literacy area. 12% exceeded expectations.

The underlying report similarly says writing attainment continues to require sustained focus, although it identifies improvements at some schools and points to stronger teaching and assessment practices.

That matters because literacy isn't reading alone.

A pupil can comprehend text yet leave primary school unable to express ideas in writing at the expected standard. Stronger reading is therefore good news, but it isn't by itself evidence that Cayman's broader literacy problem has been solved.

Mathematics presents the same challenge. Only 51% met the expected standard in 2025.

The harder primary-school measure is the proportion of children meeting the expected standard across reading, writing and mathematics combined.

That is important because it asks whether children are leaving primary school proficient across all three core disciplines, rather than whether performance has improved in the strongest one.

Government should make that figure as prominent as its headline reading gain.

One strong Year 11 cohort isn't yet a trend

The secondary results pose a different question.

A rise from 40.2% to 52.9% in one year in the proportion of Year 11 pupils achieving five or more passes including English and mathematics is too large to dismiss.

“What matters most is the progress students make throughout their time in school,” Director of Education Services Mark Ray said. “The data show that many students are making meaningful academic gains and leaving school with stronger qualifications and more options for their future.”

That may prove correct. But one cohort doesn't establish a trend.

Year groups change. So can examination entries, the mix of qualifications attempted and the number of subjects pupils sit. Those factors matter when a headline indicator moves 12.7 percentage points in a year.

The simplest test comes next.

If the five-pass rate including English and mathematics remains above 50% in 2026 and stays there across subsequent cohorts, the evidence for structural improvement becomes much stronger.

If it falls sharply back towards its previous level, 2025 may look more like an unusually strong cohort.

That benchmark can be established now, rather than after next year's results are known.

Mathematics remains the warning light

Cacho acknowledged that mathematics remains a priority.

“Schools are continuing to strengthen teaching strategies and provide additional support to help students build strong numeracy skills,” she said.

The longer-term numbers explain why.

English rose from 73.8% in 2019 to 82.5% in 2024 before easing to 79.9% in 2025. Mathematics increased from 49.4% in 2019 to 64.1% in 2021 before returning to approximately 49% in 2025. Science rose from 58.2% in 2019 to about 69% in recent years.

The report itself describes English and science as areas of relative strength while identifying mathematics and higher-level subject attainment as more variable.

The difficulty is particularly stark among pupils receiving specialist support for special educational needs and disabilities.

About 8% of the Year 11 cohort received such support. Within that group, 34.2% achieved the expected outcome in English and 23.7% in science. In mathematics, it was 10.5%.

Those figures don't fit comfortably into a simple story of system-wide improvement.

The benchmark down the road

COVID raises one problem of comparison. Cayman's unusual education system raises another.

About 4 in 10 secondary pupils are educated privately, according to the government's education data. The proportion is higher at primary level.

Private education is therefore not a small alternative system in Cayman. It educates a substantial share of the children who will eventually enter the same universities, training programmes and labour market as pupils leaving government schools.

A simple comparison isn't possible. Private schools use different curricula, examinations and assessment systems.

But the absence of an easy comparison makes a robust one more important.

Parents should be able to answer a straightforward question: At comparable ages, are children in government schools achieving similar standards in core skills to children educated privately?

If a measurable gap exists, is it narrowing?

If there isn't one, the data should show that too.

The government's headline results don't provide that comparison.

The competition begins when school ends

This matters because education policy in Cayman is inseparable from employment and immigration policy.

A young Caymanian leaving a government school doesn't compete only with the pupil who sat beside him or her.

Young Caymanians compete for scholarships, university places, training and jobs alongside privately educated Caymanians, Caymanians returning from education overseas and experienced workers recruited internationally.

The labour market remains tight overall. Unemployment was 2.6% in winter 2025. Among Caymanians it was higher at 4.1%, although that represented an improvement from 4.6% a year earlier. An estimated 24,358 Caymanians were employed, up 13.4% from the previous year. (eso.ky)

The government's own policies recognise that education and immigration are two sides of the same problem.

Education Minister Rolston Anglin MP said last year that government needed greater collaboration to ensure education was “aligned with the labour market”, giving Caymanians the greatest opportunity to maximise their talents.

Premier André Ebanks, discussing the same reforms on 29 May 2025, said Cayman needed to ensure its people gained the qualifications and experience required to build successful careers in their own country. The objective, he said, was to reduce unemployment and develop a more skilled national workforce.

More recently, government has described the problem in unusually direct terms: when the skills employers require can't be found locally, talent is sourced overseas. Closing that gap, it said, requires education, workforce development and the labour market to be brought into closer alignment.

That puts the school results in a different light.

The question isn't merely whether a Year 6 pupil reads better than a Year 6 pupil did in COVID-affected 2022.

It is whether Cayman’s schools are producing young adults with the literacy, numeracy and qualifications needed to compete successfully for the opportunities their own economy creates.

Putting Caymanians first in employment policy can improve access to opportunities. Education policy determines how many young Caymanians leave school equipped to seize them.

If educational outcomes improve, employers should over time be able to find more of the skills they need among Caymanians and rely less on overseas recruitment for jobs that the domestic workforce can reasonably fill.

If those skills aren't being produced, immigration policy alone can't solve the problem.

That is why a 45% writing benchmark matters beyond the classroom. So does mathematics at 51%. So does a Year 11 five-pass rate of 52.9%.

They are ultimately measures of employability.

Government's current strategic policy explicitly calls for education to create opportunities for work and for immigration policy to secure tangible opportunities for Caymanians while still attracting essential overseas talent when necessary.

The ultimate test of education policy, therefore, can't stop at examination results.

Government should be able to show what happens next: how many Caymanian school-leavers enter further education and training, how many find work, what occupations they enter and whether employers increasingly find locally the skills they previously had to recruit overseas.

Better than the rest of the world?

There is another comparison Cayman can't readily make.

International youth-literacy statistics aren't the answer. They principally measure basic literacy, rather than whether a teenager reads, reasons and solves problems at the level expected of someone of the same age in a high-performing education system.

International learning assessments are designed to answer the harder question.

The OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, assesses 15-year-olds in reading, mathematics and science. Cayman doesn't currently participate.

That means Cayman can increasingly answer one question: Are government schools doing better than they did before?

On several important measures, the latest results say yes.

But it has a less satisfactory answer to another: How good are those results compared with what Cayman should reasonably expect?

That requires harder comparisons - against a pre-COVID trajectory, across core subjects together, between successive cohorts, against other pupils educated in Cayman and against credible international standards.

From early years to the workforce

Minister Anglin argues that improvement begins long before secondary examinations.

“Education improvement happens when we invest in Early Childhood Care and Education as the foundation to learning and future outcomes,” he said. “When families, schools and communities begin working together in the early years, students are better prepared for the next stage of learning.”

That proposition should ultimately be measurable.

If stronger early-years provision produces better prepared primary pupils, those gains should eventually appear in writing and mathematics as well as reading. They should survive the transition into secondary school and produce stronger school-leaving qualifications.

Eventually, they should appear in the labour market.

Three tests of whether the gains are real

The results are encouraging. The question now is whether they endure.

First, can Year 11 hold the line? If more than 50% continue to achieve five passes including English and mathematics across successive cohorts, 2025 begins to look less like an exceptional year and more like a structural improvement.

Second, can the gains broaden? Stronger reading should eventually be matched by writing and mathematics, and lift the proportion of pupils meeting the expected standard across all three.

Third, do better results produce more competitive Caymanian school-leavers? The longer-term measure is whether pupils are progressing into further education, training and employment - and competing successfully for opportunities in their own economy.

The ministry has better numbers. Now it needs a longer track record.

Starting the comparison in COVID-affected 2022 makes it impossible to know how much of the improvement is recovery and how much represents gains beyond the path schools might have followed without the pandemic. One strong Year 11 cohort can't settle that question either.

The next few years can. Sustained results across cohorts and subjects - followed by stronger education and employment outcomes - would turn an encouraging set of numbers into evidence of lasting change.

The Caymanian Journal has asked the Ministry of Education & Training and the Department of Education Services about the composition of the 2024 and 2025 Year 11 cohorts and the combined reading-writing-mathematics measure. No response had been received by the time of publication.