If you play a word association game with most people, the words “Gulf State” will most likely elicit the response “oil”. A few savvy property owners might say “tourism”, reflecting the building frenzy that is turning Dubai into the Torremolinos of the Middle East, but you can be pretty confident that no one will reply “education reform”. Yet places like Abu Dhabi and Qatar are undertaking some of the most thorough and radical changes to their school systems of any country in the world.
Ruled by Sheikh Al-Thani, Qatar is blessed with the third largest gas reserves in the world. But while the revenues generated by tapping into this vastly valuable resource are responsible for the booming economy, the Emir has taken a longer term view. He understands that this unexpected bonanza will one day come to an end, and that for a country like Qatar, which otherwise has few natural advantages, they need to have a Plan B. So his vision is to use Qatar’s new found wealth to create a different society, reliant not on finite natural resources but on the skills of his people. In the last few years he has set about a comprehensive reform of the school system in order to realise his ambition of turning this small country of fewer than a million people – only a fifth of whom are Qatari – into a worldwide centre of educational excellence.
To understand why Qatar needs this reform, it is important to understand how the old school system worked. Under the previous regime the Ministry of Education (MoE) used to run all the schools on an extremely tight leash.
They taught set books, ran on fixed budgets and had to use the staff they were allocated, regardless of their quality. Consequently standards compared poorly with other developed countries.
Some of these MoE schools still operate, so, when I visited Qatar recently, I spent some time in the Al-Rashad model school in Doha, the capital of Qatar, to see why the old system wasn’t working. Badria Janahi, the headteacher at Al-Rashad, is passionate about her school, but heavily restricted in the way she can run it: “Even when I want to make a decision that will benefit the school, it’s difficult to get it approved”. She is an inspired and well-regarded head, but was powerless to make the changes that her school needs to really improve.
System change
Thankfully her frustration will soon be a thing of the past, because Qatar’s schools are undergoing a transformation. As a small country with an absolute monarchy they have been able to achieve something that a large democracy would find almost impossible: whole-system change influenced by international best practice with standards benchmarked against the most successful education systems in the world. The approach employed by Qatar’s Supreme Education Council (SEC), which oversees the Education for a New Era initiative, is a free-marketeer’s dream: there is school choice, independent evaluations, headteachers are autonomous, and there is genuine competition between different schools.
While in Qatar I visited one of the new breed of independent public schools that defines the new reforms. Doha Secondary is a very different school from Al-Rashad; run by a school ‘operator’ on a contract awarded by the SEC, it is independent but fully state funded. It is unburdened by the constraints that hold the other state schools back.
The biggest change is in the way that the curriculum is set. Fawzy Salem has been teaching in Qatar for 17 years. He told me that the key to the reforms’ success is that “you teach [the students] according to their standards, not to the set books”.
