Parental Involvement in the UAE and in Other Moderate Arab States

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other moderate Arab states are ambitious to achieve comprehensive social and economic development. To this end, the UAE’s Ministry of Education (MOE) has developed a series of plans to improve the education system. These plans include introducing ways to strengthen the role of parents in promoting the education process. This chapter presents evidence that the widely reported gap between Emirati public education outcomes, as well as those of other Gulf nations, and the requirements of achieving the country’s development goals can partly be explained in terms of a lack of sufficient parental engagement with their children’s learning. Thus, the chapter recommends that parental engagement should be made an integral part of reform efforts in the UAE and other Gulf nations. This approach should be based on a context-bound framework with clearly defined roles for parents. An essential requirement is to alter parents’ views toward seeking learning-based rather than credential-based education for their children.