In Jamaica, one of the most important life experiences for many children is where you go to high school.
High school in Jamaica is perceived as a badge of your academic prowess and how you’ve been socialized, opening the doors for the job you’ll get one day and establishing a network that will serve you for life.
All of the most sought-after high schools are public, which means the whole country — rich and poor — are competing for those spots.
Those that get the best grades in the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) are the ones that tend to get their first choice of high school.
To get an edge, hundreds of parents forgo tuition-free education in the government’s primary school system and opt instead to enroll their children in private preparatory school, which can cost hundreds of thousands of Jamaican dollars each school term.
And maybe with good reason.
New data obtained by 18° North from the Ministry of Education, Skills, Youth and Information under the Access to Information Act show that 22% of PEP candidates at private prep schools in Kingston and St. Andrew got their first-choice high school in 2026, compared with 9% at public primary schools in those parishes.
Marketing and Positioning of Schools Versus Actual Results
Deciding on a school is therefore one of the single most important decisions a parent can make for their child. But there’s not a lot of data-driven independent information to make the most-informed decisions.
One prep school in a July 2026 promotion, for instance, brands itself as “The Ultimate PEP Academy” touting “Ultimate Performance” and “Ultimate Results,” and yet the data show none of its candidates got their first choice of high school in the 2026 PEP exam, placing it in a tie for last in the ranking by 18° North Data of 42 Kingston and St. Andrew prep schools with at least 10 PEP candidates.
Money is also no guarantee of a first-choice placement. Some prep schools with reported tuition of J$185,000 (US$1,166) or more a term landed in the bottom half of the rankings. At one of those—whose Grade 6 tuition is J$485,000 (US$3,056) a term—fewer than 10% of candidates secured their first-choice high school, almost on par with the 9% placement rate of students in public schools in Kingston and St. Andrew.
While percentage of first-choice placements is only one benchmark to gauge the quality of a school, it is one criterion that can be objectively measured against reputation and marketing.
That’s why 18° North Data, with help from AI, has crunched the ministry’s data and put them in a useable format that parents can use.
On this measure, some familiar prep schools made the top 10. So did lesser-known schools that outranked the established schools.
Here is the full 18° North Data ranking of Kingston and St. Andrew prep schools:-
