Changing the face of education in Saudi Arabia

A Master of Teaching alumnus is using the clinical skills he learned at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education to boost the status of teachers and raise academic standards in Saudi Arabia as part of an eight-year program in the capital, Riyadh.

Peter Robert has been teaching primary school science in the desert kingdom for one year, and says he is beginning to acclimatise to both the weather and the culture. 

“It’s character-building,” Mr Robert laughs.

“There are a lot of shocks to the system. You’ve got between 45 and 50 degrees every day for eight months of the year, and there’s no greenery around.

“You’ve got a very restricted society – even men can’t wear shorts outside in the heat. You can’t show any skin, it’s just not polite. Restaurants are segregated between family and non-family.”

Mr Robert enrolled in the Master of Teaching at the MGSE in 2011 after a career in biotechnology and medical research that spanned decades.

“I was semi-retired … and my wife suggested that I needed to do something,“ he says. 

“She researched for me, and said ‘Well why don’t you go to Melbourne Uni and do a Master of Teaching degree?’.”

After graduation Mr Robert accepted a position at Riyadh Schools in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 

Riyadh Schools comprises 11 separate schools with over 3400 students and 780 staff in the Saudi capital. The Board of Directors is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed Ibn Salman Ibn Abdelaziz, and many of the schools’ pupils hail from royal or influential families. 

In 2012, the schools’ leaders employed the Boston Consulting Group to devise a plan to raise academic standards and transform the schools into the highest performing in the Middle East. International appointments were made, including Ron Lake – a fellow Australian and former executive in Victoria’s education department, who is currently Director General of the schools.

“This project is on the one hand exciting and on the other very challenging as we attempt to engage all members of the school community in this very important work,” Mr Lake says. 

“The focus will be on providing all students with access to a high quality educational experience working with expert teachers and engaging with an intellectually rigorous curriculum.”

Now, two years into the plan, Mr Robert describes the part people like him play in the program. 

“There are almost no Saudi teachers,” he says. “The vast majority of teachers in Saudi Arabia are not Western expats like me, they’re Egyptians or Jordanians or Syrians or from Yemen.

“A lot of them are great teachers, but they haven’t had the sort of grounding that we would have for example in a Master of Teaching program. They need a lot of professional development.

“The biggest difference that I can make is to helping Arabic teachers recognise that teaching in a professional and consistent way is actually helping the kids more than just giving them As or Bs simply because they’re princes or they’re privileged,” he explains. 

“At the MGSE I got both the pedagogical and educational background but also the practical skills that I needed. I spent a lot of time on placement in pretty tough schools,” he says. 

“When you’ve got people like Professor Patrick Griffin and Professor John Hattie, it rubs off on the people who participate in those lectures and in those programs because we are really being taught by the best.”

He also encourages MGSE alumni who are interested working at Riyadh Schools to look into opportunities there. 

“For teachers who want to be involved in both teaching and making a difference and lifting the whole educational profile of a country, Saudi Arabia’s a great place to go,” he says. 

www.education.unimelb.edu.au