Sometimes, it takes a school community

Six years after the Abu Dhabi Education Council began to inspect private schools in the emirate, its efforts to raise standards are clearly paying off. In the latest round of inspections, which take place over two years, seven of every 10 schools were found to have improved. Overall, 55 per cent were found to have achieved a satisfactory performance at the very least.

Of the 183 schools inspected, just 17 were found to be “very unsatisfactory and/or poor”. Seventeen is not a big number, but it remains worrying – a significant number of children will not have access to the education they deserve and that their parents paid for.

What can be done then, about schools such as those 17, which are not doing well despite Adec’s recommendations? One argument, put forward by an educational consultant in our article yesterday, is to simply let the market decide. Now that Adec’s evaluation of each school is available online, parents will be able to see where to send their children and bad schools will just go out of business.

This is a solution of sorts though it is not the only model that could work. Another would be to consider community-led public-private partnership schools, similar to those that exist in expat-heavy cities such as Hong Kong.

Under one version of this scheme, it would be communities that would come together to provide the “private” part of the partnership. The government could provide some subsidy in the beginning – perhaps the land or handing over failing schools to a community-led organisation – while the community would run the school.

Why might that work for schools like the 17 that Adec has just found very unsatisfactory? Schools often do best when the parents are involved. Boards of governors, drawn from the parents of current pupils, mean that those who run the school have a direct ,non-financial benefit in ensuring the education is top-notch. But community-led schools would go even further. They could engage the wider community, perhaps even extending to the companies that employ the pupils’ parents. And communities needn’t be bound by language or ethnicity; they could spring up wherever there was a community of interest.

The Adec inspections regime is working. But for those schools that are failing, innovative ideas are essential. A whole community could easily raise up a school.