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School Standards & Inspections

An overview of the Office of Education Standards and the results from their private and government school reports

Joanna boxall
By Joanna Boxall
Last updated 09 March, 2023

In the Cayman Islands there is a law which states that all government and private schools, as well as education facilities, must be inspected regularly by the Office of Education Standards (OES). This is an independent division within the Cayman Islands Government. For more information on what OES does, and the reports they produce, continue reading.

On This Page

For example inspections are conducted in a) all preschools and those caring for young children, b) all private and government primary and secondary government schools, including the Cayman Islands Further Education Centre (CIFEC) and the Lighthouse School and c) all post-secondary education providers including those offering A-Levels, the IB and those offering the US High School Diploma and SATs.

The Process & Scoring Criteria

Inspectors evaluate each school and give it a result of Excellent, Good, Satisfactory and Weak. Excellent means the school has exceptionally high quality of performance and practice. Good is the expected level for every school in the Cayman Islands regardless of whether it is a public or a private school. Satisfactory is the minimum level of quality required in the Cayman Islands. All schools should meet or exceed this level of performance and practice. Weak means that the quality of the teaching and other factors is not acceptable, and urgent measures need to be undertaken to improve the quality of the performance and practice in this school or facility.

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The School System

This page was last updated on March 9th 2023 and has all the up to date school inspection reports that have been published up to that date. Although the results are slowly improving in some areas, the vast majority of schools in the Cayman Islands have been inspected and found to be 'Satisfactory' or 'Weak'. Every year a large majority of Caymanian students in weak and satisfactory schools are failing and one has to wonder if this is a problem that both parents and the schools should be trying to tackle? If parents were more invested in their children's education, and showed their children that they valued their children's education, then one has to hope that standards and results would improve.

For the Office of Education Standards Annual Report (2022) please see here. It gives an overview of which schools were grated Excellent, which were graded Good and which ones were in the Satisfactory and Weak category. For the National Schools Progress Report January 2023 see here. It is an incredibly detailed and interesting report and it covers all school inspections between 2018 and 2022 highlighting improvements and areas for further development.

The good news is that these inspection reports have elicited a response from the Ministry of Education and changes to the Government primary schools’ curriculum are underway. The Cayman Compass newspaper reported in early October 2019 that a group of officials took two trips to England to observe and gather information on the curriculum being used there. That curriculum is being used as a model for Cayman. In April 2019 Education Minister Juliana O’Connor-Connolly detailed some of the anticipated changes:

  • Children are to have mastered their times tables by the age of 9
  • More emphasis will be placed on spelling, grammar and handwriting
  • Children will learn to write computer code
  • In science there will be a shift towards hard facts and scientific knowledge
  • A mandatory second language, Spanish, will be introduced in Key Stage 2,
  • In Social Studies children will be taught about Cayman’s history and culture
  • Children will be expected to learn more at an earlier age

With this new round of inspection reports we shall see if change has been implemented.

Cayman Islands School Inspection Reports 2017-2023

Excellent Overall Result

Good Overall Result

Satisfactory Overall Result

Weak Overall Result

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