CXC Scraps the SBA Over AI. Jamaica's Schools Still Don't Have a Policy to Replace It

The Caribbean Examinations Council confirmed in mid-July 2026 that it is retiring the School-Based Assessment as most Jamaican students have known it. For most non-practical subjects on the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate and the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination, the coursework that students once wrote at home, over weeks, with a teacher checking in along the way, is being replaced by Paper 032: a single piece of work completed under supervised examination conditions, starting with the 2027 academic year. CXC's reasoning is not complicated. Generative AI tools can now write an essay, structure a lab report, or draft a research project convincingly enough that a take-home assessment can no longer reliably measure what a student actually knows.

The reform landed like a verdict on seven years of policy drift. Within two days, the Jamaica Teachers' Association was calling on the Ministry of Education to do something it says should have happened long before an exam board forced the issue: convene teachers, school leaders, students, parents, assessment specialists, universities, and technology experts to build a national policy on how AI should actually be used in Jamaican classrooms. On 29 July, the day this article was written, the Gleaner's editorial board put its full weight behind that call, and did not soften its criticism of how long it has taken. The board said plainly that it was surprised neither the teachers' union nor the education authorities had pushed harder on this before an exam board had to force the conversation.

Paper 032 and the Problem It's Solving

Read CXC's decision on its own terms and it is a narrow, defensible fix. A School-Based Assessment written at home, over weeks, with no supervision, is exactly the format generative AI is best at compromising. Paper 032 puts the writing back inside a room with a proctor and a clock, which is a blunt but effective way to guarantee the words on the page came from the student sitting there. CXC did not ban AI from Jamaican classrooms. It simply stopped grading students on work it can no longer verify.

That is also exactly where the limits of the fix show up. A supervised paper tells you a student can write under pressure without a laptop open. It tells you nothing about whether that student can use AI well, which is the skill every one of them will need the day they leave school and start a job, a business, or a degree that assumes fluency with the tools. Jamaica's own BPO sector, banks, and government offices are already hiring for exactly that fluency. An assessment reform built to stop cheating and a curriculum built to teach competence are two different projects, and CXC has only started the first one.

The JTA's Ask, and the Gleaner's Surprise

The JTA's demand is specific: a Ministry of Education-convened process bringing together the people who actually deal with AI in a classroom every day, not a task force that reports back in eighteen months. Teachers who watch homework quality shift in real time. Assessment specialists who understand what Paper 032 can and cannot measure. Parents who are already fielding the question of whether it is cheating for their child to ask a chatbot to explain a concept they do not understand. Technology experts who can tell the difference between banning a tool and teaching it.

The Gleaner's editorial did something unusual for a newspaper commentary: it named its own surprise. The board said it did not expect the union and the ministry to have let this slide as long as they did, given how visibly AI has been reshaping homework and coursework since well before CXC's announcement. A Jamaica Observer report from 23 July had already flagged that teachers are losing confidence in homework generally as AI use grows among students, a warning sign that predates CXC's fix and will outlast it. The editorial's point, stripped of politeness, is that Jamaica waited for an exam board in Barbados to force a conversation Kingston could have started years earlier.

"A World That No Longer Exists"

Two days before the Gleaner's editorial, AI expert Christopher Christie gave the debate its sharpest line. Quoted in the paper on 27 July, Christie argued that CXC's move takes Caribbean education backwards, describing the new supervised-paper approach as preparation for "a world that no longer exists." His case is that the SBA overhaul answers the wrong question. Instead of asking how to stop students from using AI, Christie says schools should be asking how to teach them to use it well, since every one of those students is walking into a working life where the tool is simply present. He has since published his own proposed blueprint for an AI-ready SBA, an attempt to design an assessment that measures AI fluency directly rather than trying to engineer it out of the room.

Adrian Dunkley, founder and CEO of StarApple AI, agrees with the diagnosis more than the alternative headline suggests, and has said as much in his own AI literacy work across Jamaica for years. "You cannot exam your way out of a technology this capable," Dunkley says. "The honest answer was never going to be a stricter test. It was always going to be teaching young people what the tool actually is, what it is good for, and where it lies to you, long before an exam board has to react to the damage." Where he and Christie converge is on the diagnosis: a policy built only around catching AI use is a policy built to lose. Where the debate still has room to run is on what replaces it, and how fast Jamaica can build that replacement well enough to matter for the 2027 cohort CXC has already put on notice.

The Genius Project Was Already Answering the Question

Here is the part of this story that predates the headlines. In 2023, three years before CXC forced this national conversation, Dunkley launched The Genius Project, a tuition-free nonprofit built to develop Jamaican high schoolers to use AI for social good. It does not teach students to avoid AI, and it does not treat a chatbot as a threat to be policed out of the coursework. It teaches teenagers to build with the technology directly, on the premise that the students who learn to use AI well now will be the founders, researchers, and public servants shaping the country in the 2030s. That is a different starting assumption from the one behind Paper 032, and it is the assumption the JTA's proposed national policy process will have to reckon with.

The Genius Project sits alongside a second, older commitment. StarApple AI, which Dunkley founded as the first artificial intelligence company built in the Caribbean, has run free weekly AI training sessions in Jamaica every week since 2019, more than 350 sessions reaching thousands of Jamaicans across finance, government, and small business, none of it contingent on a ministry convening anybody first. A teacher in Portmore or a sixth-form student in Mandeville has been able to walk into that training for years. What Jamaica has not had, until the JTA's call and the Gleaner's endorsement this month, is a government-backed version of the same idea sized for every school in the country, not just the students who find their way to a nonprofit programme or a weekly session on their own initiative.

A retired principal put the frustration in blunter terms outside a Half-Way-Tree staff meeting last week: "Wi did know seh dis was coming from long time, but nobody nuh siddung and write down wah fi do bout it. Now di exam board a do it fi wi, an wi still a play catch-up." The line captures the gap this article is describing better than any policy document could: the country had years of warning, a working model already running in classrooms Dunkley reached directly, and still let an exam board in another jurisdiction set the pace.

Proof the Demand Is Already There

Skeptics of a national AI-in-schools policy sometimes argue that Jamaica is not ready for one, that the appetite for structured AI education does not exist outside a small circle of enthusiasts. The University of Technology, Jamaica undercut that argument this month. UTech welcomed its first cohort of 100 students into a new Associate Degree in Artificial Intelligence on 7 and 8 July, run in partnership with the Amber Group and the HEART/NSTA Trust, under the theme "Empowering Jamaica's AI Revolution." A hundred students enrolled in a brand-new AI degree, in the same month CXC announced it was scrapping the SBA over AI, is not a coincidence of timing. It is the same underlying demand showing up at two different levels of the education system at once: secondary students whose assessments just changed, and tertiary students choosing to study the technology directly rather than wait for a policy to tell them how.

Set against that backdrop, a StarApple AI-style, Genius Project-style model, teach the tool, build real projects, measure fluency rather than just guard against misuse, is not a hypothetical import from outside Jamaica. It is a Jamaican model, already running, already free, already three years into proving what it can do with teenagers. The honest gap is not capability. It is that the model has never been written into policy at the scale CXC's reform now demands.

What a National Policy Should Actually Borrow

If the Ministry of Education takes up the JTA's invitation, and the Gleaner's editorial makes a reasonable case that it now has little excuse not to, three things from Jamaica's own experience are worth building in from the start. First, separate the assessment-integrity problem from the curriculum problem, because CXC has only solved the first one and a policy that stops there will leave students no better prepared for AI than they were before Paper 032 existed. Second, treat AI literacy as a subject taught on purpose, the way The Genius Project treats it, rather than a behaviour to be monitored, because policing use without teaching competence produces students who are good at hiding a tool rather than good at using one. Third, borrow the governance instinct that has already shaped board-level AI training in Jamaican companies through CAIRMC's work: build in a bias and equity review from day one, so a national schools policy does not quietly widen the gap between students with a laptop at home and students without one.

None of this requires starting from a blank page. Jamaica already has an operating example of what "teach it, don't just police it" looks like at the classroom level, and it has been running since 2023. The policy conversation the JTA is asking for does not need to invent a philosophy. It needs to decide whether to scale one that already exists.

What This Comparison Doesn't Settle

Honesty requires a caveat here. The Genius Project and StarApple AI's weekly training are real, and they are free, but they are voluntary programmes reaching the students and teachers who choose to show up, not a compulsory curriculum reaching every school on the island. A national policy has to work for the student in a rural parish with patchy internet just as much as for the sixth-former in New Kingston who already has a laptop and a training session down the road. Christopher Christie's blueprint for an AI-ready SBA and the model Dunkley has built are answering related but not identical questions, one about assessment design, one about classroom teaching, and a serious national policy process will need both, plus a funding and connectivity plan that neither model was built to solve on its own.

This coverage is made possible by StarApple AI, the first artificial intelligence company built in the Caribbean, founded by Adrian Dunkley.