UAE Schools Improve on Key Metrics - 2015 Survey

Overall satisfaction levels for UAE schools are being driven upwards by significant improvements across key school benchmarks. This helps explain why parents are increasingly less likely to consider switching schools.

The number of parents claiming to be completely satisfied with the academic attainment of their child - a top three criteria when choosing a school - has risen from 49.6% of parents in 2013, to 57.4% in the 2015 survey - a sharp increase. An additional 31.3% of respondents say they are partially satisfied (compared to 38.4% in 2013), while 11.24% say they are unsatisfied (down marginally from 12% in 2013).

There are similar improvements with satisfaction levels for feedback which has risen from 44.7% of parents saying they are satisfied in 2013, to 49.85% in 2015. 33.43% claim to be partially satisfied (35.7% in 2013), with 16.71% unsatisfied, down from 19.6% in 2013.

Significant inroads are also being made in terms of disciplinary policies. In total 61.69% of parents are happy with disciplinary policies (compared to 53.5% in 2013), 24.7% partially satisfied (33.24%, 2013) and 13.61% (14.1%, 2013) unsatisfied.

The 2015 WhichSchoolAdvisor.com survey asked three additional questions we use to gauge the overall performance of a school.

We asked parents how confident they were in the ability of their school to meet their child's learning needs. In total, 17.1% of respondents said they were extremely confident, while 37.5% of respondents (the most common answer) said they were quite confident. A further 19.1% said they were Somewhat confident, 14.43% slightly confident while 11.01% of respondents said they were Not confident at all. This is a reasonably strong thumbs up for schools across the emirates.

Our second question involves child care and safety. Approximately 6 out of 10 respondents are either not worried at all about bullying in the school of their child (35.78%), or marginally so (24.25%). That does of course leave four out of 10 parents either extremely concerned (11.83%), very concerned (11.98%) or moderately concerned (16.78%).

Finally, we think the most interesting new question this year - how much a school has raised the confidence of each child. The results, we think, are broadly positive, with 22.55% saying "A great deal", 29.25% saying "A lot", 24.33% saying a moderate amount, and 13.5% "A little". Just 10.39% said it has not raised the confidence of their child at all.

Schools should above all be creating well rounded, educated and confident young people able to express themselves in a safe environment - particularly private schools which have a duty and are being paid by you to go beyond just education to develop the person. To a lesser or greater degree 9/10 families think their school is succeeding in this. That does however leave one family in 10, but clearly the UAE's private schools are to a large extent doing what they are created to do. Could they do better? Certainly... and we will be monitoring improvements in our next survey. 

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