Classroom in crisis

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Old-fashioned teaching methods, lack of male teachers and increased competition from private schools are all widening the gap between public and private education in the UAE. Claire Ferris-Lay investigates.

Every night Ferial sits down with her seven year-old son, Ahmed. The Ras Al Khaimah mother isn't reading Ahmed's homework or cooking his dinner, she is teaching him what he should have learnt in school that day. "I need to teach him lots otherwise he will get low marks. It depends on me not the school," she explains.

Ferial is determined that, despite Ahmed attending a public school, he will not become one of the worrying statistics so often associated with the country's public school system. Most recently it was reported that 40 percent of year twelve pupils failed their exams in December after the curriculum was changed just months before pupils sat the exams.

A rapidly growing economy has forced the UAE to rely heavily on a foreign workforce and while education reforms are being implemented at a ministerial level, these are not translating to the classroom, hindering emiratisation efforts and leaving many Emiratis unprepared for working life.

With an estimated 250,000 additional jobseekers expected to enter the UAE workforce by 2020, the country has ploughed all of its efforts into emiratisation programmes. As a result around 86 percent of employed UAE nationals currently work in the public sector, according to the National Bank of Kuwait. Despite the success of such initiatives, a recent World Bank report suggested it was education not nationalisation programmes which needed to be improved across the GCC.

"How are they [students] going to lead the country if their education system is not giving them the skills that they need?" asks Natasha Ridge, a visiting research fellow at Dubai School of Government, who wrote a doctoral thesis on education in Ras Al Khaimah.

In the bid to improve education, the UAE has taken a number of significant steps to improve schooling across the country through developing new bilingual teaching schemes, introducing new expatriate advisors and increasing funds for education.

According to the World Bank, education across the Gulf is a strategic priority with on average five percent of GDP allocated for education. This is spearheaded by the UAE, which sets aside around 25 percent of its federal budget for education. For 2009 the UAE has designated around $2bn for schooling, an increase of 23 percent compared to the previous year.

Much of this budget has been spent on developing new teaching techniques, training teachers and improving schools themselves. While a number of task forces have been put in place to overhaul current curricula, key performance indicators (KPIs) are standardising testing in maths and English to shift away from rote learning.

In September the Ministry of Education announced new standards for public schools would be implemented following a successful government pilot education initiative, Madaris Al Ghad (MAG) or Schools of Tomorrow, which focuses on teaching in both English and Arabic.

The MAG school project was launched last year in 50 schools across the emirates and anecdotal evidence already suggests that pupils in MAG schools are more interactive and active in the classroom.

There are also other similar trial schemes underway across the country, including a number of successful public private partnerships. Teachers for the 21st Century Professional Development Project, a $54m project which aims to train 10,000 government school teachers in the northern emirates, is another example.

While many of these schemes have been successful there are still a vast number of pupils, whose schools don't fall under trial schemes, who are leaving school without qualifications and unprepared for work life. In 2007, only eleven percent of high school graduates scored highly enough on the Common Education Proficiency Assessment English test to bypass a year of remedial English before qualifying for university.

December results from a global comparative test, Trends in International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS) also revealed the widening gap between public and private schools in Dubai. Private school pupils in year four averaged an extra 40 points above their counterparts in the public sector in mathematics while the gap widened to almost 100 points in year eight.

"With few exceptions the level of quality of high school education is not very good," says Clifton Chadwick, senior lecturer in international education management at the British University of Dubai.

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READERS' COMMENTS

Classroom in crisis Old fashioned education
Posted by melvin din, Auckland, New Zealand on Saturday 4 April 2009 at 23:23 UAE time


We must look at integrating the curriculum and a project based learning will broaden the learning experiences. No need to teach Maths , or science or woodwork etc in isolation.
here in New Zealand we are intergarting most of the curriculum areas . This can only be achieved through reducing the class size or having a teaching assistant / teacher aide/ teacher trainee to share some teaching load from the class room teacher. Lots of money been spent on advisors and consultants who are infact creating more paper work for the teacher.

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