The World Bank applauded Saudi Arabia’s Education and Training Evaluation Commission’s (ETEC) decision to begin evaluating and accrediting the Kingdom’s schools in accordance with international best practices.
ETEC will evaluate and accredit public, private, and international educational and training institutes. In collaboration with the Ministry of Education, it will do so “systematically and consistently” to increase school effectiveness. This, the Commission said, will be an effective tool for “building high-quality education that supports the labour market, human capital development, economic growth and increased productivity”.
The programme will include two major stages – self and external evaluation
The World Bank stated that ETEC’s programme would include two major stages: self and external evaluation. Self-evaluation refers to a collection of internal processes and procedures used by public, private and international schools to assess their performance and ensure their efficacy and efficiency. External assessment is a set of processes and procedures carried out by an outside specialised education team that evaluates and appraises all elements of performance and measures the quality of the system’s outputs.
ETEC has already built a digital platform for school evaluation and accreditation. It features a complete information system for handling evaluation processes, and it will be utilised to collect school performance data for inspection purposes.