My work in Al Ain

Well, probably about time I (Ron) put pen to paper (finger to the keyboard) and said a little about the work I’m doing.

About 3 years ago, The Sheik of Abu Dhabi decided it would be a good idea to upgrade the education system in this state (Emirate). – I suspect other Emirates are doing similar things. In Abu Dhabi it’s called the Public-Private Partnership for Public School Management' . The idea is to enable local and regional private education providers to manage selected public schools in the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC) was established in 2005 to oversee the program. Here’s a bit from their website:

Shaikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Minister for Presidential Affairs and Adec Vice-President, said: "Our goal is to provide world-class public education. "The partnership is intended to increase the professional standard of national staff and ensure their professional development," Shaikh Mansour said, adding: "The partnership provides a measure of independence to each school administration, besides promising better quality of educational outcomes and ensuring better and more frequent participation of parents in the education process."

Participating schools and their students will enjoy better school facilities, efficient and less bureaucratic school administration systems, modern teaching and assessment methods, up-to-date curricula, more intensive use of information technology and applications and rich extra-curricular activities. Principals and teachers, including national staff, will get improved job incentives and professional development opportunities.

The company I work for is called School Improvement Partnership (S.I.P.), which is a subsidiary of GEMS (Global Education Management Systems). My school is the Sultan Bin Zayed school for Basic Education. It is a year 6-9 school. Age range 12 – 16. But there are a few older students as well. They failed at some stage and the system doesn’t allow you to progress to the next year unless you pass. It’s housed in a newly built school and so there’s a very pleasant environment to work in with spacious rooms, good Air Con (when it works and doesn’t leak), lots of classrooms, an auditorium etc. ADEC is in the process of upgrading all the ICT. Plan is for every classroom and staffroom to have a computer, projector and smart-board; 2 ICT labs, 10Mb internet line, and all fully networked.

I really like the team I’m working with. There’s my ESL expert Michael - from NZ via South Africa – my English expert Amir, from Iran via Oman – my maths expert Ismail from Somalia via England, my translator Mohamed from Sudan via US & India, and soon to arrive my science/ICT expert Fasil, from England -----------------------. These guys are just fabulous. They’re really cluey about their subject area and have great interpersonal skills. So we’ve already established excellent working relationships amongst the staff of the school. Our role is to upgrade the teaching and management in the school and to help them implement a new curriculum (in all subjects, but focussing on english, maths, science and ICT).

With the team working with the classroom teachers, my job is to manage them and then to work with the school administration (Principal, Vice Principal, ..) to improve school planning and budgeting processes, get some parent involvement, and generally support them in putting the systems and processes in place to ensure good management and smooth running.

The staff in the school have really welcomed us and are very positive about working with us. Most are not Emirati (apart from the boss, VP and about 6 others), but come from neighbouring states like Oman, Syria, Jordan & Egypt. Most don’t have an educational qualification, but they do have undergraduate degrees in their specialty subject. Up to now most have been working directly from a textbook provided by the Ministry of Education. Day 1 is page 1 and they work through to the last page! So our work is cut out for us all – but being willingly taken on by the staff. So much so that we’re already seeing good signs of progress.

I like the boss (Mohamed) and VP (Rashed). They are both very capable, have good ideas and are willing to listen to suggestions.

All in all, I recon I’ve pretty well won the lottery and am looking forward to the rest of my time here.