THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

 THE NUMBERS GUYANA DIDN’T GIVE YOU

       A Region Published Its Exam Results. Georgetown Held a Ceremony             Instead.

 Accountability Desk | August,2026

Every other education ministry in the Caribbean Examinations Council’s catchment let the numbers speak. Guyana’s Ministry of Education gave a ceremony, three headline figures, and a table of seventeen vocational trades — and called it a results release.

On August 18, 2026, the Caribbean Examinations Council convened its annual results ceremony in Anguilla, hosted for the first time in a decade outside the region’s larger capitals. CXC’s Registrar and CEO, Dr. Wayne Wesley, and its Director of Operations, Dr. Nicole Manning, presented the 2026 May-June cycle’s performance to the full region at once: candidate counts, subject entries, grade distributions, absenteeism, examination irregularities, and the regional pass rate for every major certification CXC administers.

The presentation was public, it was itemized, and it was the same for every territory sitting in that room.

Guyana’s Ministry of Education held its own event that same day, at the Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre in Georgetown. Minister of Education Sonia Parag and Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain delivered remarks. What Guyana’s students, parents and press received from that event was not a report. It was a set of talking points — a national pass rate, a Mathematics improvement figure, a candidate count, and an unverified projection of vocational certifications still awaiting confirmation from the very council that had, that same day, published a complete regional accounting.

This is not a story about a failing grade. It is a story about a government that had access to the same comparative data as every other CARICOM ministry and chose not to publish it — and about what that choice, examined against the numbers CXC did release, looks like it was built to avoid.

WHAT CXC PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

CXC’s regional release on August 18 gave every territory a full comparative baseline. The figures below are CXC’s own, delivered from its own podium, to the full region simultaneously:

• Regional CSEC overall performance: 72.18 percent, a slight increase over 2025.
• Regional CSEC Mathematics acceptable-grade rate: 42 percent, a 4-point improvement.
• Regional CAPE acceptable grades (Grades I–V): 93.52 percent.
• Regional CVQ candidates: 4,977, across 37 occupational areas.
• Region-wide CSEC absenteeism: more than 32,000 candidates did not sit their exams — a trend CXC officials themselves called “worrying.”
• Region-wide examination irregularities: 128 recorded, up from 80 the prior cycle, including the first-ever official categorization of AI misuse as a form of exam malpractice.

Every one of those figures came from CXC’s own ceremony, delivered the same day, in the same format, to every member state. Guyana’s delegation was in a position to hear all of it. None of it appeared in what Guyana’s Ministry told its own public.

WHAT GUYANA PUBLISHED, ON THE RECORD

Compare that to the complete inventory of what Georgetown’s ceremony produced, as reported:

• A national CSEC pass rate of 67 percent — with no stated methodology for what counts as a “pass” in that figure, and no breakdown by subject, school, region, or gender.
• A Mathematics pass rate of 34.5 percent, framed only against Guyana’s own 2025 figure of 32 percent — never against the region CXC had just placed it inside.
• A CAPE claim of broad “stability and growth,“ specified only as “seven examined units” recording declines of 1 to 3 percent — with no regional CAPE figure offered for comparison, and no full subject table released.
• A CVQ projection of 2,813 certifications — a number the Ministry’s own Chief Education Officer acknowledged was not yet official, pending CXC confirmation, at the moment he announced it.
• No absenteeism figure. No SBA non-submission figure. No irregularity count. No mention of AI misuse, despite CXC formally introducing the category this cycle.

Nothing in Guyana’s release was false, so far as this desk has been able to verify. That is precisely the point. Every figure Georgetown chose to publish was accurate, favorable, and incomplete — and every category CXC flagged as a regional concern was a category Guyana’s ceremony did not mention at all.

CXC gave the region a report. Guyana gave its public a ceremony.— The 592 Guardian

SIDE BY SIDE: THE COMPARISON GUYANA DID NOT MAKE

Where a figure is marked “not disclosed,” that is not this desk failing to find it. It is the complete record of what was and was not said at a nationally covered government press event. Where a comparable regional figure exists and Guyana’s does not, the silence is not neutral — it is a choice made available by CXC’s transparency and declined by Guyana’s Ministry.

THE QUESTION THIS DESK IS PUTTING ON THE RECORD

The Ministry of Education has both the data and the obligation to publish it. CXC hands every territory the identical breakdown Guyana’s delegation heard in Anguilla. Nothing prevented the Ministry from releasing a comparable document — a subject-by-subject table, a regional benchmark, an absenteeism figure, an irregularity count — the same day, in the same format CXC itself used.

It did not. It held a ceremony, named its top performers, and moved on to seventeen vocational trades before a single comparative figure could be asked about.

This desk is not asserting why. We are asserting what happened, on the record, and putting the question to the Ministry directly: if the underlying results support the celebratory framing offered at Pegasus, what is the rationale for withholding the very comparative data CXC placed in the public domain that same day? A Ministry with nothing to qualify has no reason to publish less than the region it answers to.

The 592 Guardian has written to the Ministry of Education and to Chief Education Officer Saddam Hussain requesting the complete, subject-by-subject 2026 results — regional comparison included — and will publish any response in full.

A NOTE ON WHAT THIS PIECE DOES NOT CLAIM

This desk sought a regional teacher-salary comparison to test whether compensation helps explain the performance gap identified above. It does not exist in usable form. Crowdsourced salary aggregators return sample sizes too small to be meaningful — eleven data points for Barbados, thirty-seven for Jamaica, a single submission at one point for Guyana — and in at least one case returned a figure for Barbados equivalent to roughly five US dollars a day, which is not a real wage and was discarded.

A comparative review of what regional governments publish on public-sector pay found that most, including Guyana and Jamaica, disclose only aggregate ministry compensation spending, not post-level salary scales — meaning no like-for-like regional comparison currently exists in the public record.

What is verifiable is that Guyana’s own teacher salaries rose substantially over the 2024–2026 cycle under the negotiated agreement with the Guyana Teachers’ Union — a graduate teacher on the 2026 scale earns GYD 277,882 monthly, part of a phased increase the government has described as a 57 percent cumulative rise since 2021. That spending is real, it is documented, and it is fair to ask what it purchased. This desk declines to assert a wage-to-outcome causal link the data cannot currently support — and will pursue the regional salary comparison as its own investigation, sourced to government pay scales rather than crowdsourced estimates, rather than force an unverified number into this piece.

SOURCING

CXC regional figures: Caribbean Examinations Council, Official Release of Results Ceremony, Anguilla, August 18, 2026, as reported. Guyana figures: Ministry of Education press briefing, Pegasus Suites and Corporate Centre, Georgetown, August 18, 2026, as reported by Guyana Chronicle, Guyana Times, News Room Guyana, and HGPTV. Teacher salary figures: Ministry of Education–Guyana Teachers’ Union agreement, as reported by the Department of Public Information; 2026 salary scale as compiled by 592Hub from GRA and Ministry of Finance notices.