Minister of Education, Skills, Youth and Information, Dana Morris-Dixon, has announced that 56 per cent of students who sat the 2025 Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examinations achieved proficiency.

The PEP, which assesses students’ mastery of the National Standards Curriculum, evaluates higher-order thinking skills such as problem-solving, analysis, and synthesis. The exam includes components administered in grades 4, 5, and 6.

Speaking at a press briefing, Morris-Dixon said that seven per cent of the students reached the highly proficient level.

“Are they where we want to be? No. We have more work to do,” she said. “But what it says is that the interventions, the work being done by the schools, are paying off. With a challenging cohort, we’re seeing progress being made, which means that what we’re doing is right. We just need to intensify it and do more of it. And I have to thank the teachers for this improvement in mathematics.”

A total of 33,462 students across 964 institutions were registered to sit the exam. The minister also reported a 25 per cent decrease in student absenteeism for the sitting.

In mathematics, Morris-Dixon noted marked improvement between grade levels. In the 2023 grade 4 results, 26.5 per cent of students were at the beginning level. However, by grade 6 in 2025, only three per cent remained at that level.

Regarding language arts, the minister clarified that the test measures mastery of the curriculum rather than basic literacy. In grade 4, 33.9 per cent of students were at the beginning stage and 27.4 per cent were developing, suggesting significant gaps.

“That’s a huge number of our children, and that’s probably linked to the issues during COVID,” Morris-Dixon said. “Especially with developing your language skills—you want to do that face-to-face.”

At that point, just 34 per cent of students were proficient. However, by grade 5, that number had risen to 56.6 per cent, and by grade 6, 67 per cent were proficient, with an additional two per cent achieving highly proficient.

In science, 61 per cent of students were proficient and seven per cent highly proficient. For social studies, 58 per cent reached proficiency and 14 per cent were highly proficient.

“So we are on our way,” Morris-Dixon said. “Our [National Minimum Proficiency Target] in the ministry is to get to an 85 per cent proficiency level by 2030.”