Editorial | Reviewing PEP

The reported data, and the declarations of the island's education authorities, suggest that Jamaica’s grade-six students performed better in this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) exams.

For instance, according to the outcomes released last week, of the students who completed the language arts exam, which tested how well they comprehend and communicate in English, 66.5 per cent were deemed proficient, and another 5.5 per highly proficient.

At the “proficient” level students are assessed to have required competence in the subject for the grade and, on entering high school, might need only “minimal academic support”.    The latter group show an advanced level of competence and in Grade 7 might need “extended learning activities” to keep them stimulated.

In mathematics, 61 per cent of the students met the “proficient” benchmark, while eight per cent were highly proficient. Overall, therefore, 69 per cent made the cut.

This year’s performance in these two critical subjects compare to 69 per cent and 63 per cent, respectively, for language arts and maths in 2025 for overall proficiency outcomes.

“These PEP results show us the resilience of our country,” said the education minister, Dana Morris Dixon, at the unveiling of the data, alluding to last October’s devastating Hurricane Melissa that disrupted schooling in large swathes of western Jamaica.

Added the education ministry’s official summary analysis of the exams: “The 2026 PEP results demonstrate encouraging progress in student achievement and provide evidence that interventions implemented across the primary system are yielding positive outcomes. 

“Literacy, numeracy and language arts exceeded national targets, while mathematics came very close to the benchmark. The most significant finding is the substantial improvement shown by the same cohort from grades 4 to 6. 

“The results confirm that the PEP framework is not merely an assessment tool, but also an instrument for identifying learning needs and guiding instructional improvement.”

While The Gleaner’s Editorial Board welcomes the improved statistics and hopes that they signal a locking, and acceleration of improvements in national education outcomes, it looks forwards to a deeper explanatory conversation by Dr Morris Dixon and her technocrats on the numbers, including clarity on whether they are directly comparable with those for 2025.  Indeed, after the COVID-19 lockdowns and prevented in-class teaching and learning for two years and caused adjustments to the PEP exams, in 2024 Dr Morris Dixon’s predecessor, Fayval Williams, advised that that results for 2022 could not be properly part of a comparative analysis. 

“The 2022 cohort only sat the Ability Test because of the COVID‑19 disruptions,” Ms Williams said. “Therefore, the results for 2024 cannot be compared with 2022. The valid comparison years are 2019, 2023 and 2024.” 

The question of whether a similar consideration is relevant at this time, as well as the need to stakeholders with a better basis of analysing and interpreting the data, arises given, as the ministry noted, the reduction, from seven to four, “the number of assessments” in this year’s PEP because of the hurricane.

“The grade 6 mathematics and language arts performance tasks and the science and social studies curriculum-based tests were suspended, allowing for a fair and reliable assessment despite the loss of instructional time,” the ministry’s report said.

This matter, on its face, requires further and better particulars, a clearer and fuller explanation.

As PEP is structured, performance tasks (PT) tests students’ operational competence, their capacity to practically apply knowledge and to synthesise and think through issues, as would be expected at the grade level.

The curriculum-based tests, on the other hand, are intended to measure baseline knowledge relative to the curriculum, without necessarily the intellectual creativity inherent in the PT tests. 

There is also a need for a deeper discussion of the literacy and numeracy components of the exam, which was introduced for the first time.  While literacy and numeracy ought to be an issues at grade 6, with the students on the cusp of secondary education, the Editorial Board nonetheless welcomes this development as part of its long-held position that the capacity to read, write and do sums appropriate to a child’s age and grade level is crucial to changing Jamaica’s perennially weak educational outcomes.

With respect to literacy, the education ministry reported that 79 per cent of grade-6 students had ‘mastery’ of the skills, with another 17 per cent tracked at “near mastery”.  This indicates that with little effort, 96 per cent of students would have been in the frame for full literacy.   On numeracy, the figures were 75 per cent and 17 per cent, respectively, with respect to mastery and near mastery.

However, the education ministry also reported that the literacy assessment “focused exclusively on reading comprehension, as the writing component was not administered due to the suspension of the extended paper”.

Expectedly, there is a gap between mastery of the foundational skills in literacy and numeracy and being proficient in language arts and maths, the tests require greater levels of critical thinking by students.  Whether the reported grade-6 literacy rate is truly representative of the facts, given that only part of the test was administered, is another issue to be explored.