Quality is the biggest challenge facing nation’s education

DUBAI // The UAE has made a lot of progress toward meeting the 2015 goals set out by Unesco’s Education For All Movement, but quality remains its greatest challenge.

According to Unesco’s programme specialist for education, Dr Faryal Khan, who spoke to UAE government officials on Thursday to prepare them for the next stage of the initiative, financial transparency is key to quality education.

“While the UAE has high literacy rates, you have high numbers of enrolment in primary education and secondary education, you have a good higher-education system, the quality remains a challenge,” Dr Khan said after the Education For All forum.

“Despite the heavy investments, when you look at the Pisa (Program for International Student Assessment) and Timss (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) results, the UAE is not faring very high.

“Is it investing where quality matters? That’s my question.

“That’s why you need educational financial data. You need to have access to transparent educational financial data to see where the UAE is investing because if you’re not investing in areas where quality makes a difference in key drivers of quality, you will not achieve quality.”

UAE students scored below average in Pisa in 2012 and was ranked 48th in maths, 44th in reading and 46th in science out of 65 participating Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. In the last round of Timss, the UAE also placed below average.

The Unesco Education for All Movement was launched in 2000 and challenged member countries to meet six main goals by 2015.

They are: improving early childhood education; ensuring all children have access to free education; ensuring young adults have equal access to life-skill programmes; improving adult literacy by 50 per cent; achieving gender equality in education; and “improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all so that recognised and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills”.

According to Unesco Institute of Statistics data presented by Dr Khan, 79 per cent of children in the UAE are enrolled in preschools, 86 per cent of girls and 92 per cent of boys are in primary school, and the net enrolment rate in secondary education is 66 per cent for males and 60 per cent for females.

The next five months will be dedicated to collecting statistics and other evidence showing what the UAE has achieved and what was learnt through the process. The National EFA Review will be presented to Unesco in June.

Mahra Al Mutaiwei, the director of the Regional Centre for Education Planning, said the results would help shape national education policy. It will also set the post-2015 Unesco education agenda.

“The six goals, they have a very clear indicator, so from this indicator we can measure where is the UAE, and his excellency, the Minister of Education, said the UAE had achieved a lot of this indicator,” said Ms Al Mutaiwei.

“But at the same time we need to show the other countries what we achieved and how we achieved it so they can learn from this experience that we have here in the UAE.

“Also we need to learn about the others, what they have achieved and how they achieved it.”