Our thrust is on quality education: Riyadh emir

RIYADH — The government is giving top priority to improve the quality of education. “The government is keen on achieving remarkable development and progress of the country in order to raise its rank as one among the leading countries in the world. For this purpose, the state sees that the investment in education is the ideal way for achieving the progress of the nation and the people,” Emir of Riyadh Prince Faisal Bin Bandar has said. The emir cited appropriation of more than one-fourth of the general budget for education. "It is the best proof of government's thrust on quality education," the Saudi Press Agency (SPA) quoted him as saying. He spoke after inaugurating, on behalf of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman, a conference on evaluation of public education at King Fahd Cultural Center here on Wednesday. Prince Faisal highlighted that the state embarks on a policy of continuously supporting all projects complementing improvement of educational quality by earmarking the surplus of budgets in previous years. The government’s main thrust is on further improving the quality of higher education through taking advantage of all the possible means, he said. The conference with the theme of “Prelude to education quality and development" was organized by the General Education Evaluation Authority. Prince Faisal urged the educators and educational experts to shoulder their great responsibility toward their nation and citizens through performing their mission of safeguarding the younger generation from straying into deviant thoughts and ideologies. “They have to play a bigger role in guiding the students onto the right path so as to raise them as true citizens who fulfill the aspirations of their nation,” he said. Speaking on the occasion, Naif Al-Rumi, governor of the authority, said the benchmark for evaluating any society is the quality of its education system and the graduates from educational institutions. “The conference is aimed at taking advantage of the successful global experiments in the field of evaluation and use them in improving the curriculum and educational practices, in addition to spreading the culture of evaluation among the educators,” he said. Prince Faisal also opened an exhibition organized on the sidelines of the conference. The authority was constituted in October 2012 with the objective of bringing about a qualitative shift in general education through assessing the performance of both public and private schools in the Kingdom.