ABU DHABI - The United Arab Emirates will be making new plans aimed at progress in education, observers said on the sidelines of a conference that concluded on Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.
Participants at the Education and the Requirements of the GCC Labour Market Conference, held from 1-3 February 2010, and organised by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research (ECSSR) urged establishing new approaches for governing the education sector.
There is "a mission to improve the quality of education across all sectors," said Professor Jim Mienczokowski, Executive Director of Higher Education at Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC), which was established few years ago to carry out that mission.
In its first 18 months of operation, "ADEC opened three vocational education colleges in areas such as Al Ain and Al Gharbia where no provision existed before that and we set up those partnerships," said Mienczokowski, citing the establishment of other projects.
However, Mienczokowski promises more plans to come.
"What we haven’t done so far is we haven’t as yet established all of the approaches and protocols that we would like in terms of governing the sector and make sure it’s a high quality highly regulated sector. And we haven’t yet released our strategic plans but that will come shortly," he said.
Mienczokowski stressed that commercialization of education in the region is "an important way forward".
"When we are talking about high quality and high investment education we are missing perhaps that there are many people who won’t have access to education unless it is more affordable and there is capacity if done properly in e-learning, in commercial approaches to education that would give people a step into education and advantage them," he said.
Mienczokowski also stressed the need to promote more research, which he says is "a very new focus for Abu Dhabi" that has "a long way to go".
The Executive Director of ADEC urged paying more attention to the English language.
"I think if the English language approach is followed it will give the widest pathways of access for everybody here," he said.
On the role of universities, Mienczokowski said that they "are wonderful institutions for helping find solutions but the primary function is not to solve political and cultural problems on their own or lead direction but to feed in to assist governments to make informed choices."
Meanwhile, Paul Dyer, Research Associate at the Dubai School of Government (DSG), stressed the need for education to move from memorization to application of knowledge.
Dyer, who co-manages the Middle East Youth Initiative at DSG, also called for pushing the boundaries of education, promoting critical thinking and developing soft skills among the youth.
He also argued that there is a business case for a more broad-based adaptable education in the region.
According to Dyer, DSG seeks to provide a venue to "bring people from various sectors together and to have constructive dialogue. That is our primary role as an institution in this regard in addition to the education and training to future Arab leaders."
However, Dyer warned that more investment in education in the region needed to be backed with better quality.
"Fundamentally the quality of education is suffering in the Middle East. The region has been effective in investing more in education, in building more schools and hiring new teachers," he said.
"But even though there have been efforts at reform it has not really been all that successful in shifting the type of education that it has provided to young people to meet the demands of the changing and more modern economy," he added.
"The most important thing you can do for young people today is to provide them with a broad-based adaptable education," stressed Dyer.
And the private sector has also a role to play.
"Another fundamental challenge is invigorating the private sector to hire or to reach out to young people to provide them job opportunities," he said.
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