Teaching standards in the country’s British schools are to be evaluated by the British Schools in the Middle East (BSME), which will offer “accredited member” status to those institutions meeting inspection standards. It is hoped that the accreditation will help parents select a school for their children.
This can be an especially difficult process for newly arrived expatriates who are unfamiliar with local private schools.
“I think it’s of benefit to parents, absolutely,” said Geoff Turner, chairman of the BSME. “But fundamentally it’s about ensuring quality education.”
The BSME has 28 member schools in the UAE, plus a further 43 members in a dozen other countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Mr Turner said he expected all member schools to apply for accreditation.
Full details of assessment reports created for the programme will not be made public. Schools will evaluate themselves, but their assessment will be subject to an audit by a team of specially trained head teachers from other BSME schools. The validation team has already begun specialist training, and the system will be fully under way at the start of the coming academic year.
Mr Turner said a similar system was being used in the UK, where it showed that schools were frank in their assessment of themselves.
“Good schools are quite rigorous in their self-evaluation. I think schools are their own worst critics. It’s easy to find faults,” Mr Turner said.
A private company, Penta International, which is already involved in quality monitoring of some government schools in Abu Dhabi, will assist in drawing up criteria for accreditation. Penta will also train principals to become accreditation review auditors.
“It is about being fair and rigorous,” said Mark Evans, the managing partner at Penta. “The BSME has some very small schools and some very large, successful schools and it needs one system that will work equally for all types of school.” Schools that did not apply for, or were not granted, accreditation, would remain simply as members of the BSME without accredited status.
While government schools are subject to monitoring, private schools are bound by few quality controls.
Daniel Bardsley
Page last updated 01 January 2020