By the ListCayman Education Desk
If you are paying international school fees in Grand Cayman, you are paying for specialist teaching and small classes. So here is a question worth asking before you sign an enrolment contract, and it recently produced a very clear answer.
Are Higher Level and Standard Level IB students taught in the same room?
What CIS confirmed
The IB Diploma Programme Coordinator at Cayman International School has confirmed in writing to a parent that IB Diploma classes at the school are taught with Higher Level and Standard Level students combined in the same class. The exceptions are Mathematics: Applications and Interpretation SL and French Ab Initio, which are offered at Standard Level only.
The school also confirmed that there are no plans to split HL and SL into separate classes. The reason given was resourcing: not enough staff, not enough rooms, and not enough timetable blocks to run them separately.
On tutoring, the position was equally clear. Private tutoring is treated as a personal choice made by families, and the school does not cover the cost.
Those are the school's stated positions, confirmed by CIS in correspondence with a parent. Everything that follows is our opinion.
HL and SL are not the same course
This part is not a matter of interpretation. The IB publishes it.
On the IB's own Diploma Programme curriculum page, Standard Level subjects are 150 teaching hours and Higher Level subjects are 240 teaching hours. Each student takes three or four subjects at Higher Level and the rest at Standard Level.
That is a gap of 90 teaching hours per subject, roughly 60 percent more time, spread across two years. HL is not SL with harder exams. It is more content, studied in more depth, with additional assessment.
Why this matters most in Grade 11 and 12
These are the two years that decide everything that follows. They produce the predicted grades that drive university offers, and then the final results that confirm or lose them.
In our view, when two levels share one room for those two years, somebody is being served second. Either the Standard Level students are swept along at Higher Level pace and depth they did not sign up for, or the Higher Level students are held to a Standard Level rhythm and the extra content gets pushed into homework, lunchtimes and after school sessions.
We are not saying it cannot be done well. Experienced IB teachers run split level rooms every year and some do it superbly. But it is harder, it depends heavily on one teacher's planning and workload, and the margin for error is thinner than in a single level class.
"Not enough staff or rooms" is a resourcing choice
Staffing and timetabling pressures are real, particularly with small cohorts. A school cannot run an HL class for three students in a block that clashes with two other required subjects.
But in our view, those pressures describe a budget decision rather than a law of nature. Staff numbers, room allocation and how many blocks the timetable carries are all choices the school makes.
Cayman International School publishes its tuition. For the 2026 to 2027 school year, Grades 11 and 12 are listed at 30,700 Cayman dollars per year, about US$37,400 at the school’s own stated conversion rate of 1 US dollar to 0.82 KYD, before the application fee, the enrolment deposit and the other charges on the same page.
We believe families paying that should be told how classes are structured before they enrol, not discover it in Grade 11. This is not a secret the school hid. It answered the question honestly and promptly when asked. Our point is that almost nobody knows to ask.
The cost that lands on parents
There is a second cost here that does not appear on any fee schedule.
When a class runs at two levels at once, the gap tends to get filled privately. Families hire tutors, and in Cayman that is an expensive market. The school's position is that this is a personal choice, which is fair enough as a policy. In practice, we believe it means a family can pay premium tuition and still end up paying again to keep a child at the level the school enrolled them in.
To be fair, CIS is not alone
Mixed HL and SL classes are common across the IB world, especially at schools with small cohorts, and the constraints cited by CIS are genuinely the two that IB coordinators everywhere wrestle with. Some schools handle it by adding HL only sessions on top of the shared class.
But "other schools do it too" is a weaker defence at the top of the price range. A school charging more than US$37,000 a year for Grade 11 should be measured against what it markets, which is specialist teaching and individual attention, not against the global average.
Questions every parent should ask, at any IB school
Ask these before you enrol, and ask for the answers in writing:
- Are HL and SL taught separately in any subject, and which ones?
- If they are combined, exactly how is the extra HL content delivered? Extra timetabled blocks, or homework and after school?
- How many students are in each IB class, and how many of those are at each level?
- What happens when a student falls behind? Is any support included in tuition?
- What are the school's IB results over the last three to five years: average diploma score, pass rate, number of students scoring 40 or above?
- How many years has the teacher taught this specific subject at Higher Level?
- Can we speak to two current Grade 12 parents?
The bottom line
Asking costs nothing. Finding out in the middle of Grade 11 costs a great deal.
If you are choosing an international school in the Cayman Islands, treat class structure the way you would treat square footage on a house. Get it in writing, before you sign.