• Home
• /
• Education

Upgrading education standards under focus at conference

The UAE hopes to leverage its position from 46 to 20 in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

More than 1,000 educationists representing administrative managements and teaching and technical staff in government schools discussed the vision of the Ministry of Education, its strategies and initiatives. These include important projects which need to be carried out within a fixed time-frame to achieve the objectives of UAE Vision 2021 and the national agenda.

At the discussions held at the fourth annual Dubai Education Conference held at the World Trade Centre on Thursday, it was stated that every project requires concerted effort and the ministry has to be supported at every stage to attain a qualitative leap in education.

The conference was held under the auspices of Hussain bin Ibrahim Al Hammadi, Minister of Education, and was attended by Marwan Al Sawalih, undersecretary of the Education Ministry, and a number of senior officials.

Citing figures the UAE has scored at international tests, Al Sawalih said the UAE hopes to leverage its position from 46 to 20 in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).

He also spoke of the ministry’s ambitious plans to raise the quality of schools in terms of efficiency and competence of teachers and school managements to 100 per cent; increase the rates of admission to kindergartens to more than 95 per cent; and reduce disparity in the standard of academic performance between male and female students from 33 to 20 points.

Al Swalih spoke at length about the ministry’s focus on upgrading the quality of education at different levels, providing high quality school services and raising the standard of the students’ performance at the international level. Other plans envisaged include increase in the number of students admitted to universities without the need to attend the foundation year, harness linguistic skills among students, provide them qualitative experiences through training during school summer vacation, diversify the sources of knowledge among the teachers and upgrade the quality of the educational process and administrative and extracurricular activities.

Dr Abdul Latif Al Shamsi, Director-General of the Institute of Applied Technology also spoke at the conference.

news@khaleejtimes.com