Cayman Academy has been rated as ‘Good’ by the Office of Education Standards. That is the expected level of quality for Cayman Islands schools, and is the second-highest rating next to ‘Excellent’.
Inspectors found Cayman Academy to be ‘Good’ in nearly all areas of assessment, including student performance and progress, quality of teaching, and leadership of the school.
“Cayman Academy performs well in all major aspects of its work and the capacity of the school to improve further continues to be good. The overall performance of Cayman Academy was good. Across all quality indicators, most were judged to be good,” according to the inspection report.
Located on Walkers Road in George Town, Cayman Academy is a private school managed locally by the Cayman Islands Conference of Seventh Day Adventists. The school has an enrolment of 324 students ranging in age from 3 to 17 years.
Sixteen students were identified as having special education needs. More than 70% of the student body is Caymanian.
The school has 30 teachers and 11 support staff. The principal is O’Neil Duncan.
The school was rated ‘Good’ in all areas of student attainment and progress, except for Kindergarten science, where it was rated ‘Satisfactory’.
The school received ‘Good’ ratings for student behaviour, teaching quality, learning, student assessment, curriculum, health and safety, school leadership, staff evaluation and community links.
One of the main recommendations from inspectors is to ensure that students sit their Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate examinations (CSECs) in Year 11, rather than Year 12.
“The school should review the structure of the curriculum and ensure that most students should follow the CSEC curricula programmes in Years 10 and 11 with final examinations towards the end of Year 11,” according to the report — which also noted that both Year 11 and Year 12 students at the school outperform their peers at the national and regional level.
Inspectors rate schools in individual categories, using a scale of Weak/Satisfactory/Good/Excellent. The overall grade is determined according to the individual scores.
The ‘Good’ rating represents the expected level of quality for Cayman schools. The last full inspection of Cayman Academy had been in 2009.
“The vision for the future of the school was clear and leaders focused upon ensuring that standards remained consistently good. Leaders and staff were equally committed to the vision, ‘To be the best, spiritually, academically and socially’. The Principal led by example and, alongside the Vice Principals, had high aspirations and saw the school as increasingly high performing,” according to the report.
Because Cayman Academy received an overall ‘Good’ grade, it will not be inspected again until the next cycle of inspections, which begins in January 2021.
An interview with … Peter Carpenter, Director, Office of Education Standards (1 of 2)