The Current Educational Reforms in Qatar

The educational system of Qatar made use of the intrinsic-nationalistic and the cultural traditions of the Arabic schools until the late 1990s. The stakeholder and the leadership of Qatar were behind the times. An approach had been made to the RAND Corporation for examining and scanning the existing educational system, and command options for creating a new system of education.

The RAND assessment:

The assessment study has concluded that the education system of the country was inflexible and was devoid of standards and the international benchmarks. As a result, it led to the reform in which a specific system of Independent Schools was entrenched along with the setting of new curriculum standards. Enhancement has been made to the teacher and the professional development for finding the most productive systems for the Qatari students to be victorious along the Western and the international benchmarks.

The reform was chalked up by the main principles of accountability, autonomy, choice, and variety. The evaluation of the post-reform put forward that the system is still far from being what is actually should be. The initiatives of the new teacher development have focused on the improvement of the professional development for the teachers through licensing and escalated professional development programs.

The background of Qatar education:

In Qatar, there was no formal educational system before the discovery of oil. Kuttab, the traveling educators used to teach the students. They used to travel from one village to another teaching Quran and language.

The progress towards a more comprehensive form of education started with a school for boys established in Doha in 1948. The Government started supporting the school in 1950. Simultaneously, encouragement was given for the schooling for girls. In 1956, the first public school for girls was launched.

An establishment of the Ministry of Education known as Wizarat Al-Maarif happened at the same time which became one of the first ministries of Qatar. Starting from the 1950s, the income that emerged from oil has made Qatar enable to render the citizens with a range of social-welfare benefits. The government started providing free education and health care to the Qatari citizens along with allowances to the widows, orphans, divorcees, and people with special needs. The wealth that was generated from the oil resulted in the nation’s educational flagship which is called Educational City. The Qatar Foundation’s establishment welcomed European and American higher education renderers and generated branch campuses of the tier one universities of the world.

The reforms:

During the 1970s and 1980s, Qatar experienced many reforms. Qatar tried to eradicate illiteracy among the massive nomadic community. But little attention was paid to the quality. There was hardly any vision in what the schools wished to obtain. After a couple of decades of the expansion of schooling, the Gulf Union initiatives were supposed to be created that aimed to bring currencies closer together and unify the schooling via one unified curriculum for the entire subjects.

Then, in the late 1990s, the very idea of school independence led the way to the establishment of scientific schools. It led to the ability to determine own curriculum in Science and Mathematics, make use of the Western curriculum and teach in English. It has become a model for change followed by the other schools.

Simultaneously, the quality of the Qatar educational system became a subject to the public discussion and the government concern. It leadership desire for boosting Qatar’s knowledge-creating capacity was observed. Young people could enhance their skills required to participate in the knowledge-based economy. The motivation primarily came from the fact that the school system of the nation was not capable of producing high-quality results in the academic achievement, attendance in the college, and labor market success. For recognizing the areas of improvement, an approach has been made by Qatar to the RAND corporation for analyzing the present educational system.

The weakness:

• The school is lacking vision and mission in the educational system’s development.
• The school’s organizational structure was hierarchical.
• The initiatives taken were piecemeal.
• No clear lines of authority were there.
• There was no clear decision-makers or leadership.

Due to the missing leadership, the schools started reverting to the higher authorities. The Ministry of Education has outlined the curriculum which was phased grade by grade by the teacher’s effort and expense. The curriculum of the Ministry of Education was not designed in a way that let the students and the educators to interact and possess highly student-centered classrooms due to the limited local resources.

The new educational system in Qatar:

An analysis done by RAND identified the strength and weaknesses of the present system. It stresses on two prime reform priorities like improving the basic elements of the education system through a standard-based system and shaping a system-altering plan for addressing the overall inadequacies of the system.

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Sudipto Das

Sudipto writes educational content periodically for MyPrivateTutor Qatar and backs it up with extensive research and relevant examples. He's an avid reader and a tech enthusiast at the same time with a little bit of “Arsenal Football Club” thrown in as well. He's got more than 5 years of experience in digital marketing, SEO and graphic designing.