Bermuda spends less of its economy on public education than the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or Barbados. The numbers explain why so many of our children are educated somewhere else — and a closer look shows the drift towards private education has always come in distinct waves, not a single steady slide.

Every August, Bermuda quietly exports its future. Teenagers wheel suitcases through LF Wade International bound for Halifax, Washington, Manchester, Kingston — not for holidays, but for school. It has become so routine that we rarely stop to ask what it says about the island they are leaving behind.

The honest answer is uncomfortable: a growing share of Bermudian families, at every income level, have concluded that the best education for their child is not available at home, neglecting in the process the very good institution that is Bermuda College, where a first degree is affordable at least to the associate level. Can you fault the parents? Not really — both government and families have, in different ways, failed to develop the public system and Bermuda College to the point where they can compete internationally.

A silent divide, 50 years deep

In 1972, roughly 12 per cent of Bermuda's primary-age children attended private school. By 2023, that figure had climbed to 44 per cent, nearly half. This is not a one-off spike; it is a five-decade drift, accelerating sharply in the past 15 years, as parents who can afford the fees have voted with their wallets against the public system.

That 50-year drift did not happen in one motion; it arrived in three distinct waves; each tied to a different upheaval.

The first wave traces to the desegregation legislation of 1965 and the amalgamation of Bermuda's dual school systems that followed in the early 1970s, joining formerly separate Black and White schools together, especially at the primary level.

It is no accident that 1972 — the year this dataset begins — records private primary enrolment at its all-time recorded low of just over 12 per cent. As integration proceeded, a handful of formerly state-maintained schools, together with Bermuda's single-sex schools such as Saltus Grammar School, chose to remain or become independent, tuition-funded institutions rather than fold into the newly unified public network. That choice, made by a cluster of schools now of amalgamation, produced Bermuda's first meaningful wave of what has always been described, plainly, as “White flight”.

The second wave arrived roughly two decades later. In the mid-1990s, Bermuda restructured its entire public system into the three-tier model still largely in place today — primary schools feeding into middle schools (introduced in 1997) and then two senior schools, The Berkeley Institute and CedarBridge Academy. The disruption of a wholesale reorganisation pushed another cohort of families towards private education at almost exactly the moment Bermuda's international business sector was entering its own boom.

The reinsurance build-out that followed catastrophic losses such as Hurricane Andrew in 1992 brought a fresh generation of expatriate executives to the island, and their children filled out — and helped expand — the private schools just as the public system was being taken apart and reassembled.

A third wave is arguably under way right now. The Ministry of Education's own description of a system still “emerging from a prolonged period of leadership turnover and structural reform” is fuelling fresh private-school interest, while a parallel and less visible shift — toward home schooling and other alternative arrangements — is quietly growing too, echoing an earlier spike in home-based education recorded in the 1990s, when the home-schooled population was reported to be growing by as much as 20 per cent in some years. Each wave has had a different trigger — integration, restructuring, uncertainty — but the destination has consistently been the same: away from the public system.

The drift matters because it hollows out the public system's base of engaged families and resources precisely when it needs both. It also creates two parallel Bermudas: one educated in small, well-funded private classrooms preparing directly for overseas university, and another inside a public system that the Ministry of Education itself now describes as being in “transformation” — a polite word for years of leadership turnover, reorganised school tiers and disrupted continuity.

The cost and the return

Bermuda's government spends roughly 1.93 per cent of GDP on public education. Compare that with Barbados (4.04 per cent), the world average (4.40 per cent), Canada (4.14 per cent), the United Kingdom (4.96 per cent) and the United States (5.42 per cent). Bermuda is not simply behind its wealthy peers — it is behind a small Caribbean neighbour with a fraction of its GDP per capita.

The results track the spending. On the 2025 Cambridge Checkpoint and IGCSE assessments, the Department of Education's own summary acknowledged there is “room for improvement” against international averages, citing a non-selective intake, small and statistically volatile cohorts, pandemic-era disruption, and — tellingly — a system “emerging from a prolonged period of leadership turnover and structural reform”. It is a candid admission that reform itself has been part of the disruption, not only the cure for it.

Two caveats belong here, and they cut in different directions. First, GDP is a flattering — or at least misleading — denominator for Bermuda specifically. International business, chiefly reinsurance, accounts for something like 29 per cent of measured GDP, but a large share of that value does not really circulate through the domestic economy: it books through Bermuda's balance sheets without translating into local wages, spending or tax revenue in proportion to its size.

That is a meaningful part of why an island with one of the highest GDP-per-capita figures in the world can, by some estimates, also have roughly a third of its population living in hardship. Measuring education spending purely as a share of that GDP risks making Bermuda look either stingier or richer than it really is, depending on which way the comparison is run.

A more honest yardstick is spending per publicly educated student.

If you combine the Department of Education's most recent operating budget of roughly $133 million plus Bermuda College’s $15 million budget, you have a total of $148 million against a public school and college enrolment of around 4,500, which works out to around $31,000 per pupil. Even allowing for the real complications of purchasing-power comparisons on a small, import-dependent island, this is not, by any reasonable standard, a system starving of money.

Which points to the harder conclusion: funding is very unlikely to be Bermuda's binding constraint. The more uncomfortable question — and the one this series keeps returning to — is how effectively that money is being spent, not how much of it there is.

The broken promise of reform

The outstanding leadership and performance of David Burt, the Premier, cannot be overlooked — he has delivered on many key areas of the economy — but education is one area where his government has not scored well. Bermuda has not lacked plans. “Plan 2022” promised 75 per cent reading proficiency by Primary 3. “Education Transformation” followed, bringing in outside consultants (Third Story, whose contract ended in December 2025), new parish primary schools, a revised Code of Conduct, and repeated ministerial reassurances that the system is stabilising.

Each initiative has been announced with real conviction. But a system that needs a new stabilisation plan every few years is, by definition, not stable — and families making a one-time decision about where to send a five-year-old cannot afford to wait for the next iteration to work. The consultants have left; the Government now says it has the data, models and lessons needed to move forward independently. Whether Bermudian-led ownership succeeds where successive imported models did not is the test the current generation of students is living through in real time.

The comparison we keep avoiding

Bermuda likes to measure itself against London, Toronto and New York. It rarely measures itself against the Caribbean, where the comparison is not always flattering. Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago report literacy rates above 99 per cent. Yet even strong literacy numbers mask deeper strain: across the wider Caribbean, only 4.9 per cent of students sitting CSEC exams in 2024 passed five or more subjects including mathematics and English, and only 36 per cent passed mathematics outright. Trinidad and Jamaica have both ranked in the bottom third of Pisa's global reading, maths and science rankings. In other words, the region as a whole — not Bermuda alone — is grappling with a foundational-learning crisis, even where headline literacy looks strong. Bermuda's challenge is not unique to Bermuda; it is a small-island version of a Caribbean-wide problem, layered on top of a public-versus-private split more extreme than most of its neighbours.

One methodological caution belongs here before the comparison goes further. These regional literacy and attainment figures are not always apples to apples. National rates for Barbados or Trinidad and Tobago typically capture the entire school-age population sitting inside largely public systems; Bermuda's own headline attainment figures need to be read the same way — as a measure of the public system specifically, set against other countries' public systems, rather than against a blended public-and-private national average. Conflate the two and Bermuda's public schools can look artificially worse, or better, than they are, simply because nearly half of Bermuda's own children are being educated — and tested — somewhere else entirely.

The price of learning abroad

Perhaps the clearest signal of where confidence actually lies is what the government itself funds. The Ministry of Education's scholarship and awards budget have risen from about $1.5 million in 2023 to roughly $1.9 million in 2024-25 and $2.2 million in 2026 — funding 60 to 67 students a year to attend Dalhousie, Howard, Winston-Salem State, the University of Sussex and similar institutions abroad. Overseas awards are worth up to $25,000 a year; local study tops out at $7,500. Bermuda is, in effect, investing more each year in helping its brightest leave than in the system that produces them.

That comparison needs one further qualifier. Bermuda College's tuition is heavily subsidised: Bermudian students pay roughly $2,500 a year, a fraction — often three to seven times less — of the cost of an equivalent year overseas. And because Bermuda College confers associate degrees rather than a full four-year bachelor's, almost any Bermudian who wants a bachelor’s degree must spend at least two years studying abroad regardless of how well-funded or well-run the college is now.

Overseas scholarships, then, are not purely a vote of no confidence in Bermuda College; part of that spending is simply the unavoidable cost of the last two years of a degree Bermuda does not yet grant at home. That does not undercut the larger point — the Government is still investing more in helping students leave than in the institution built to keep them, for as long as it can, at home — but it does mean the comparison is not quite apples to apples either.

Let me emphasise importantly that none of this is criticism of the students, their families or the scholarship programme itself, which does real good for the people. It is a criticism of a policy environment in which leaving has become the rational choice and the Government's own budget quietly agrees.

What real change would require

Three things would move the needle faster than another rebranded strategic plan. First, sustained — not episodic — investment: closing even half the gap with Barbados would mean roughly doubling current spending and holding it there through multiple electoral cycles, not one budget year.

Second, leadership continuity: the ministry's own diagnosis names leadership turnover as a driver of poor outcomes, so protecting principals, senior staff and instructional strategy from constant restructuring is not optional. Government should also support Bermuda College to stand out enough that more students choose to stay for at least their first year of a degree before going overseas — a path that would let students take practical internships here, in the industries surrounding them, and would ensure resources are available to lift the college's profile.

“What you cannot see, you cannot have” — perhaps government and the private sector should come together to build hostel facilities at Bermuda College, letting young Bermudians who want to taste boarding life stay start here, as at any other college. That alone could be an incentive to rebrand education in Bermuda.

Third, radical transparency on outcomes, published consistently enough that parents can watch trends rather than react to isolated announcements.

Bermuda is a wealthy jurisdiction. It can afford to educate its own children at home to a standard that does not require an August exodus to feel confident about their future.

Whether it chooses to, as ever, is a question of priorities rather than resources.

· Dr David Annan lectures on economics at Bermuda College and is a policy consultant

• David Annan, PhD, lectures on economics at Bermuda College and is a policy consultant