With Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia has committed to an ambitious cross-sectoral reform agenda. The education system is at the forefront of the country’s effort to diversify its economy. Focusing on developing human capital is crucial if Saudi Arabia is to transition to a balanced and sustainable economy that is less dependent on fossil fuels and public sector employment.

Saudi Arabia has achieved universal access to education for a large and geographically dispersed school‑age population. With its impressive gains in enrolment, however, Saudi Arabia has stretched the capacity of educators and administrators to deliver and assure high-quality learning. The advances in participation will now need to be matched with equivalent progress in student learning and skills if the Kingdom is to achieve the ambitious development goals outlined in Vision 2030.

Since 2016, Saudi Arabia has embarked on an unprecedented cross‑sectoral reform agenda known as Vision 2030 (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, n.d.[1]). The goal of Vision 2030 is to reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels and create a diverse, dynamic and sustainable economy. To achieve these ambitions, Saudi Arabia has introduced 13 programmes, including the Human Capability Development Program (HCDP), which aims to improve the country’s education system in order to create a highly‑skilled and productive population that can meet the needs of a 21st century, knowledge‑based labour market.

This chapter looks at how Saudi Arabia manages its schools and supports them to improve. Historically, schools in Saudi Arabia have been overseen and supported by a large body of supervisors who use centrally produced rating tools to evaluate the effectiveness of schools. These procedures tend to focus on school compliance with regulations and do not always capture the extent to which schools help students learn. Supervisors themselves, who are often responsible for more schools than they can handle, are not always well positioned to help schools improve. These circumstances contribute to an environment in which the neediest schools are neither identified accurately nor supported adequately, which affects student learning across the country. To address these issues, Saudi Arabia is developing a modern and comprehensive school evaluation framework that relies on expert, external inspectors to evaluate schools. This chapter suggests that this framework become the country’s reference point for high-quality schooling and that supervisors adopt (and be trained in) a purely supportive role. While the school evaluation framework and supervisors will provide important guidance about school improvement, the most important actors in leading school improvement in Saudi Arabia are school leaders. Currently, however, school leaders are seen as administrators, not instructional leaders. They will need to be supported to become agents of change in order for Saudi Arabia to achieve its school reform goals.

This chapter looks at how Saudi Arabia is improving the quality of teachers and teaching. Several factors have prevented Saudi Arabia from creating a dynamic and professional teacher workforce. First, it does not have a comprehensive set of teacher standards and established professional pathways for teachers. Second, teaching is seen as a secure, but not highly prestigious, profession, which affects how selective initial teacher preparation programmes can be and the rigour of teacher certification requirements. Finally, once in their posts, teachers are evaluated and supported by supervisors who are not always well positioned to fulfil either function. Many initiatives are underway to address this situation. Saudi Arabia is implementing its first ever teacher standards and professional pathways. Initial teacher preparation is being overhauled and will be offered at a post‑graduate level. The country has created a new agency, the National Institute for Professional Education Development, to lead teacher development efforts. This chapter makes recommendations about how Saudi Arabia can use the new standards to identify the best teachers, distribute them to the neediest areas, and make initial teacher preparation more attractive and higher quality. This chapter further suggests that teacher appraisal, instead of being conducted by supervisors, should instead be led by the teacher’s principal, be continuous and be focused on supporting the teacher to improve.

This chapter looks at how Saudi Arabia’s curriculum and assessment practices influence student learning. In the past, Saudi Arabia has typically relied on textbook content to direct what students learn. Assessment was based upon the amount of factual recall that students could demonstrate, often also based on textbook content. These strategies, however, are not supporting the country’s aims to train a labour force that is highly skilled and able to apply their knowledge to solve problems in novel situations. In response to these circumstances, Saudi Arabia has developed a national curriculum framework that focuses on skills and competences. It has also created a National Assessment Programme to assess student learning against the curriculum and help teachers understand how they can do so as well. This chapter makes suggestions about how the curriculum framework can be further strengthened, and how teacher appraisal methods can be reconfigured to help teachers implement the new curricula. Regarding assessment, this chapter recommends that Saudi Arabia create a national assessment framework to help co-ordinate the numerous assessments that students take, support teachers to adopt more modern assessment practices, and refine national assessments and examinations to reflect and support the educational goals of the country.

This chapter looks at early childhood education sector in Saudi Arabia. While the country has seen a rapid expansion of educational access in primary and secondary school, enrolment in early childhood education lags behind international benchmarks. There are also concerns regarding the quality of education that is provided at this critical stage, ranging from a lack of standards that govern early education settings, inconsistent licensing of private settings, inadequate teacher preparation and insufficient materials. Saudi Arabia is investing heavily in the sector to address these issues. It has created the first ever Saudi Early Learning Standards, is constructing new facilities and is expanding the early education cycle to include what is now Grades 1 through 3 of primary education. This chapter recommends that Saudi Arabia further expand its early education sector by focusing on settings other than formal kindergartens. It further suggests that Saudi Arabia develop quality assurance standards for all settings and provide teachers and principals with the materials and the training they need to help students learn.