Business must back UAE education
AL GHURAIR SHOWS HOW SCHOLARSHIPS CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE AND HELP LOW-INCOME EMIRATIS REACH THEIR FULL POTENTIAL
A s Mashreq celebrates its 50th anniversary, its energetic CEO, Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, marks a full life in both the private sector and in public life. The successful banker and businessman talks of his pride in his time as Speaker of the Federal National Council, and how he is focusing his philanthropy on the vital topic of improving education in the UAE.
“Our education system has failed. This is the truth. The bulk of UAE high school graduates have to go through a foundation year in university or college. That means we have to spend one more year upskilling students to be fit to go into universities. This is not acceptable.”
With these stark words in an exclusive interview to Gulf
News, one of the UAE’s leading bankers and businessmen sums up the crisis facing the country as its business community wakes up to the challenge of finding effective recruits from an educational system that does not deliver some of the essentials that any country with an ambitious future must have.
Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair is the CEO of Mashreq, the UAE’s leading privately owned bank which celebrates its 50th anniversary this month. He is confident that the UAE can ride out any cyclical economic downturns, even if people have “to get used to single digit profits rather than expecting double digits”, but he is very worried that the next generation of Emiratis need better skills than they are being offered today.
“I am concerned about the state of education in the UAE. For the country’s size, its growing economy, and its political role, our education should be much better. And the government has realised this and have made it a priority. We have no choice but to fix the education system from kindergarten to university.
“We need quality students coming out of high school. We need zero dropouts from kindergarten to high school. It we have any dropouts we need to know why that happened, and we should first stop that. Then we need to first address the quality of teaching and experience of learning at our schools and then we can go on and look at our universities.
“These are our challenges and this is why we need to be in the situation where all our students graduate from high school and every university will fight to admit them without a foundation year.”
Quality thinkers
Al Ghurair is well aware that educational reform cannot stop in the schools, and points out that the UAE “needs Masters degrees and PhD degrees here as well. We are not going to survive on just undergraduates. We need to have research-based universities which produce quality thinkers”.
He is even ready to recommend some kind of voucher system under which the state could pay the fees in private schools for those Emiratis that cannot afford them, but also recommends that within the state system the headmaster and parental communities be given more authority so they can improve their own schools.
“Emirati students should have a choice between private and public schooling. Over time the model for the education of UAE nationals will have to change, and we have to tell the parents of the students to take their child anywhere and we will pay the fees directly to your high school, and we will stop spending on our schools if they cannot deliver.
“But our state schools must produce good quality students. Within the public system we need to allow a bit more independence in running the individual schools in order to enhance their quality. Some state schools are better than others because they have a parents’ council, they have a good principal to direct the school to do a better job. We should give back that authority to the schools to run themselves”.
Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair is the CEO of Mashreq which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this month. He is confident that the UAE can ride out any cyclical downturns.