HURRICANE Melissa may have damaged school buildings and displaced classrooms across western Jamaica but it did not hamper students’ success, with Minister of Education Senator Dr Dana Morris Dixon reporting that children from the worst-affected parishes performed in line with national trends in this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP) examination.

Speaking at a press briefing on the 2026 PEP results at Jamaica House in St Andrew on Monday, Morris Dixon said a detailed analysis conducted by the education ministry found that students in hurricane-affected parishes performed on par with their peers across the island, providing what she described as another cause for celebration.

“We did a separate set of studies on that, just to see how they compared, to look at performance over previous years versus this year, and then…mapping it against other areas. There was no change in their performance compared to others,” said Morris Dixon.

The findings are particularly significant given that seven of Jamaica’s 14 parishes, especially those in the west, were severely affected by Hurricane Melissa last October.

According to Morris Dixon, the storm impacted 440 schools, with more than 12,800 students in the worst-affected parishes. This represented roughly one-third of the cohort that sat the examination this year.

But despite Melissa’s disruption, one of the hardest-hit parishes, St Elizabeth, produced this year’s top primary school performer.

Deputy Chief Education Officer for Exam and Assessment Maryah Ho Young said the review went beyond overall scores.

“What we actually did was look at each of the parishes in those regions as separate groups. We compared their performance to the national means… We compared it to how the trend performance for those parishes would have been in the past, and there was no fall-off when we did that comparison,” she said.

“We went even deeper, and we looked at how the children in those parishes performed by item. So for each item on the test, we compared how they performed on each of those to the other students in the other parishes, and they did not perform differently from how those children performed. So, we have a full study. We have a report that is available on the actual data and how the students performed in those parishes, but the general message is: There was no decline,” confirmed Ho Young.

The consistent showing from hurricane-affected areas comes amid overall gains in student performance.

The education ministry reported that mathematics proficiency climbed to 69 per cent up from 57 per cent in 2023, while language arts proficiency rose to 72 per cent from 60 per cent over the same period.

As for numeracy at the grade six level, 75 per cent of students achieved mastery, while results also demonstrated a 79 per cent mastery in literacy.

It was also divulged that 90 per cent of students were placed at their school of choice.

Morris Dixon noted that students are given seven choices [and], “24 per cent of the students got their first choice, 18 per cent got their second choice, 16 per cent got their third choice. So, when you add up all of that you’re almost at 60 per cent that got their first three choices,” she shared.

Some 13 per cent were placed in their fourth choice, while 11 per cent each were placed in their fifth or sixth choice, and seven per cent in their seventh choice.

Morris Dixon said that the ministry’s goal “has to be to raise the level of all our high schools so that wherever you go you feel like you can achieve”.

The education minister pointed to the adjustments made to this year’s examination because of the disruption caused by Hurricane Melissa, and argued that despite the changes to the exam’s structure its difficulty was not reduced.

Under the revised PEP arrangements, grade six students were required to sit only three assessments — the Ability Test, the Mathematics Curriculum-Based Test (with numeracy items), and the Language Arts Curriculum-Based Test (with literacy items). Science and social studies were removed from external assessment this year.

The changes, according to the ministry, were intended to maintain the integrity of national assessments while responding to learning disruption, trauma, and uneven school reopenings following the hurricane.

“I had one parent say, ‘Why didn’t you make the maths paper easier after the Hurricane Melissa?’ It was so hard, but the children did well. They did well, and I’m glad that we didn’t dumb it down,” said Morris Dixon.

“It is intentionally not easy, because we are trying to prepare our students for a world that is very different. And so, we are proud of it being a hard exam, and we’re also proud of our children for being able to handle a hard exam like this,” she said.

Morris Dixon also praised educators across the hardest-hit parishes for their dedication to ensuring that material was learnt even after an extremely traumatic event. She further extended her commendations to the other schools across Jamaica for helping their children to maximise their potential.

“It was a difficult year with the hurricane, but we persevered. As a country, I know the rest of the world is watching us. Ninety days after a Category 5 hurricane, every single school was open… That’s a global benchmark now. They’re asking us to come and explain to the world how we did it.

“It was not perfect [and] it still doesn’t look pretty. Our schools, many of them still have tarpaulins, many of them [are] still severely damaged. We’re working to fix that. Fixing 400 schools at the same time is hard but our students persevered. Our parents persevered. Our teachers, our school leaders persevered. The boards persevered through hard times. And that’s who we are as a country and as a people. We’re resilient people. And these PEP [grade six] results show us the resilience of our country,” said Morris Dixon.