CXC Ended 50 Years of School-Based Assessment Over AI. Jamaican Schools Still Don't Have a Policy to Match It.
A Jamaica Gleaner editorial published September 21 names a gap CXC's own reform exposed two months earlier: the exam board has rewritten how coursework gets assessed, but no Caribbean ministry has published a working national policy for AI in the classroom. The youth unemployment numbers show why the gap matters.
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- A Jamaica Gleaner editorial published September 21, 2026 calls for a comprehensive review of technology in Jamaican schools, covering device access and AI integration together, because no such policy currently exists.
- That gap sits two months behind CXC's own move: on July 16, the exam board announced it would phase out traditional School-Based Assessment, used for nearly 50 years, for most CSEC and CAPE subjects, replacing it with an exam-conditions Paper 032.
- UTech Jamaica research already found 96 percent of secondary students use generative AI for schoolwork, meaning the policy conversation is still describing rules for something that has been standard practice for a while.
- ILO data published August 13, 2026 found youth unemployment rose in 9 of 11 Caribbean island countries between 2023 and 2025, and that 6.1 percent of youth jobs globally sit in occupations highly exposed to AI, which raises the stakes on whether Caribbean students get structured AI education or none at all.
- Programmes like The Genius Project's free course and Solution Challenge are already teaching AI as a working skill, which is not a substitute for a finished national policy but gives students something concrete while the region finishes writing one.
No Caribbean ministry of education has published a working national policy on AI in the classroom, and a Jamaica Gleaner editorial said so on September 21, 2026. The editorial arrived two months after the region's exam board rewrote a piece of every CSEC and CAPE student's assessment, and the gap between those two dates is the story: an exam system has already changed because of AI, and the schools that prepare students for it still have no shared rulebook for how AI gets used day to day.
This matters beyond one newspaper's opinion page. The reform CXC announced in July, and the policy vacuum the Gleaner named in September, sit on top of youth unemployment data that is already moving in the wrong direction across the region. Read together, they describe a specific, current risk: Caribbean students are being assessed differently because of AI, using AI daily with no framework, and entering a job market where AI is already reshaping which roles exist, all at the same time, with the piece that is supposed to connect those three facts still unwritten.
A September Editorial Names What a July Reform Left Open
The Gleaner's September 21 editorial, headlined "Tech-in-schools review," calls for a single comprehensive look at how technology reaches Jamaican classrooms, treating device access for young children and AI integration for teaching and assessment as one policy question rather than two separate debates. Jamaica Teachers' Association president La Sonja Harrison used the moment to push for a national screen-time policy, pointing to Nordic examples where countries including Sweden, Denmark, and Finland have pulled back on classroom device use for younger children. Former JTA president Mark Malabver repeated a call he first made in July: that the Ministry of Education needs to open a formal, government-led discussion on AI in schools, rather than leaving individual teachers and principals to set their own rules.
The call itself is not new. Malabver's July comments came directly after CXC announced sweeping reforms to its School-Based Assessment framework, reforms built around generative AI. A regional exam board had already acted. Two months later, Jamaica still had no matching classroom policy on how students should be taught and assessed in the years before Paper 032 reaches them.
What CXC Actually Changed, and Why a Policy Question Follows It
CXC's reform, announced July 16, 2026 and confirmed in reporting from the Jamaica Gleaner and Jamaica Observer, ends the traditional School-Based Assessment for most non-practical CSEC and CAPE subjects. That format had run for close to 50 years, letting students complete a graded project over weeks or months under a teacher's supervision. CXC Registrar and CEO Dr Wayne Wesley gave the reasoning: "The integrity of our qualifications is not negotiable." CXC Director of Operations Dr Nicole Manning added that a CXC qualification "means something to employers, to universities, to parents, families and guardians," and that meaning depends on CXC being able to verify the work actually belongs to the student who submitted it, something generative AI made much harder to guarantee under the old format.
In place of traditional SBA, most students move to Paper 032: an assessment sat under exam conditions, with the topic released roughly a month ahead and reference notes allowed into the room. CAPE candidates in non-practical subjects start on Paper 032 with the May-June 2027 sitting. CSEC schools get a choice between traditional SBA and Paper 032 in 2027, before Paper 032 becomes mandatory from the May-June 2028 cycle onward. Practical subjects, including Visual Arts, Music, Agricultural Science, Physical Education, Technical Drawing, and Food, Nutrition and Health, keep the traditional format with tighter moderation attached.
Youth unemployment, by the numbers
Sources: Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN) Labour Force Survey, reported by the Jamaica Observer, July 1, 2026; International Labour Organization, "A Generation in Transition: Rethinking Youth Employment in the Caribbean," August 2025.
A reform built to protect assessment integrity is a reasonable, defensible response to a real problem. It also fixes only the assessment. CXC controls what happens in an exam hall. It does not control what a teacher permits during a term, what a fourteen-year-old is taught about using AI responsibly, or whether a school has a written answer to either question. The Gleaner's editorial says nobody has filled that space.
Why the Gap Lands Harder on Caribbean Youth Than Almost Anywhere Else
Many countries lack a school AI policy. Four conditions in this region raise the cost of leaving it unwritten.
Youth unemployment is already moving the wrong way
The ILO's Global Employment Trends for Youth 2026 report, published August 13, 2026, found that among 11 Caribbean island countries with available data, 9 saw youth unemployment rise between 2023 and 2025. Trinidad and Tobago's 20-to-24 unemployment rate sits at a decade-long high. ILO Director-General Gilbert F. Houngbo said: "A generation that cannot find decent work cannot build its future with confidence." A region already losing ground on youth employment has less room than most to also lose ground on how well its young people are prepared for an AI-shaped labour market.
The jobs young Caribbean workers hold are exactly the ones AI is reshaping
The same ILO report found that 6.1 percent of jobs held globally by workers aged 15 to 29 sit in occupations highly exposed to AI-related change, many of them overlapping with the clerical and administrative roles that have already declined for young workers since 2023. ILO Director of Employment, Skills and Sustainable Enterprises Sukti Dasgupta cautioned: "While the direct impact on jobs is still unclear, we must not be complacent and underestimate the risks." Caribbean economies lean heavily on tourism, retail, and administrative services, the exact category of work this exposure statistic describes.
Nearly every student is already using AI, with nothing guiding how
Research by UTech Jamaica's Professor Paul Golding and Dr Tiou Clarke, presented in May 2026, found 96 percent of secondary students surveyed already use generative AI for academic work. That number predates both CXC's July reform and the Gleaner's September editorial. The policy conversation now underway is therefore describing rules for something that has already happened almost everywhere, with nobody having decided what the rules should be.
A single exam system now carries higher stakes for what comes next
CSEC and CAPE results still gate university admission and, in many cases, the first real job application a Caribbean teenager makes. Paper 032 is untested at scale, its first mandatory CSEC cycle still two years away. A student sitting it for the first time, without any classroom-level guidance on how AI fits into daily coursework, is walking into a new exam format and an unregulated daily habit at the same time, with no institutional guardrail connecting the two.
What This Looks Like on the Ground Right Now
CXC is not leaving the SBA transition to announcement alone. The exam board confirmed it will run sensitisation sessions across all 21 of its member territories, issuing FAQs, holding live webinars, and working through local registrars so schools understand Paper 032 before it reaches an exam hall. That is a real, concrete regional response, even if it addresses the exam side of the problem rather than the classroom side the Gleaner's editorial is pushing on.
On the classroom side, the more useful regional examples are coming from programmes that decided not to wait for a ministry document before teaching AI as a skill. The Genius Project's own AI Solution Challenge puts Caribbean teenagers through a structured build process, using AI deliberately on a real project rather than picking up habits with no framework attached, then testing that project on an actual person outside the team. The 40 teams who built agentic AI tools during Future Caribbean's recent buildathon did the same thing on a larger scale. Neither programme replaces a national policy. Both show that structured AI education can start well before the policy paperwork is finished, which is the same argument Saint Vincent and the Grenadines made when its National Centre of Technological Innovation began piloting AI use in schools earlier this year, treating fluency as something to teach on purpose rather than a risk to fence off.
🧠Why "no policy yet" is not the same as "nothing to do"
A policy gap can look like a reason to wait. Students and teachers who wait lose the months before the rules arrive, months a student elsewhere spends building a habit of using AI to check understanding rather than replace it.
A school or a family can do what CXC is doing with its sensitisation sessions: set a working answer now, in writing, even an imperfect one, and adjust it once the Ministry publishes something formal. A written classroom rule that gets revised later beats an unwritten default that nobody can point to when a dispute actually comes up.
Policy lagStructured practiceRegional precedent
What Families, Schools, and The Genius Project Can Do Before the Ministry Moves
A family does not need to wait for a national policy to set a household rule: AI checks understanding after the student's own attempt. A school does not need a ministry template to write down, subject by subject, what counts as acceptable AI assistance at each grade level, and to train teachers on that standard before students are held to it. Both of those steps are available now, and neither requires the comprehensive review the Gleaner's editorial is asking for to already exist.
The Genius Project runs a free AI course for Caribbean youth built around exactly that structure: real projects, real testing, and an explicit standard for what "using AI well" looks like, rather than leaving each student to work that out alone. The course exists alongside the wider network StarApple AI has built across the region, and it reflects the same conviction Adrian Dunkley, the Caribbean's leading AI strategist and founder of StarApple AI, has pushed since establishing the region's first AI company in Kingston in 2016: that Caribbean youth do better with structured AI education now, not once every ministry has finished writing its policy. The Caribbean AI Association tracks these policy developments as they happen across CARICOM, and AI Jamaica follows how national policy decisions land specifically for Jamaican schools and students.
The Gleaner's editorial does not claim the review it wants has started, and CXC's reform covers only the exam hall. The sequence is short: an exam system changed because of AI in July, a national newspaper said in September that the schools feeding it still have no matching policy, and the youth unemployment data published in between gives a reason to close that gap before the next academic year. Whether the Ministry will open that review, and when, has not been announced.