VAE: Qualität der Bildung ist Schlüssel zum Erfolg

Die Vereinigten Arabischen Emirate haben einen langen Weg vor sich, um die selbstgestellten ehrgeizigen Ziele zu erfüllen und die eigene Bevölkerung ist der Schlüssel zur Erreichung der Ziele. Denn langfristig kann die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung nicht durch ausländische Fachkräfte getragen werden, auch wenn es wird immer Raum für ausländische Unternehmen geben wird.


Quality education is key to UAE's continued success

The UAE has a long way to go to meet its own very ambitious targets, and it will need all the human talent that it has. It needs to ensure that its small population is the key to its development. It cannot allow its economy to rely long-term on a large foreign workforce with imported skills, even if there will always be space for expatriate entrepreneurs.

The UAE leadership is working hard to dispel the sense that the UAE is a rentier society, in which the national population can live at ease, benefiting from the oil wealth. As the present generation of school children grow up, they will be called on to take part in all aspects of society. The old stereotypes of UAE nationals only working in government service and senior private-sector jobs cannot survive very long.

And this is being driven from both sides: the country needs the skills of its people, but the growing numbers of young people coming onto the job market also need jobs, and they will have to look for work in all sorts of places. The public sector already has a high proportion of nationals in its workforce, so nationals will have to seek a much wider range of jobs in the private sector. This means that they will be seeking jobs in a much more competitive market, and will have to demonstrate strong skills and a sound work ethic in order to flourish and be promoted.

National goal

The mission of achieving quality education is embraced throughout the government, and at regional and federal levels. For example, a few weeks ago Shaikh Hamdan Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the Ruler's Representative in the Western Region, called for a qualitative improvement in education and school infrastructure, noting that although there was no shortage of schools in the Western Region there was a shortage of school infrastructure and teacher training programmes. His call reflects the urgency with which the government is seeking to reform education, recognising that the old syllabus relied excessively on learning by rote, and would not help the UAE population to reach their true potential.

The key to educational reform is encouraging the ability to think for oneself, and to avoid defining education as simple learning of repetitive facts. But while it is easy to define this target, it is not so easy to deliver the result in schools across the country. One example of what has been done is the Al Ghad programme, which has already been rolled out in some schools and offers teachers new methods that are designed to encourage independent learning.

Another important goal is to encourage more research at the university and college level. Research is vital for the well-being of a country's educational establishment and its institutional ability to plan ahead, because research is about the skills and technologies of the future.

Focus on research

This is why Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, recently spoke to the Federal National Council about the Ministry of Higher Education's plans to turn the universities in the UAE into leading research centres for the region. "Our goal is quality scientific research focused on issues of interest to the community, with students being involved in research and developing the research culture at all levels in the country," he said.

The minister was also clear that he wanted the private sector to be involved in supporting this effort. He said that the government would put up some money for this programme, and had launched the National Authority for Scientific Research, with an annual budget of Dh100 million, to make it happen. However, he emphasised that more funding would be required and would have to come from a variety of sources, including competitive research grants, industrial sources and philanthropic donors.

He was right to seek this involvement from different sectors of the UAE, since it will make the money go further and also ensure that future research meets the demands of UAE businesses and society.