New aims bring with them new challenges
As the new academic year kicked off new challenges awaited schools across Saudi Arabia. How are they going to meet the Vision 2030 and increase participation in sport?
Schools in the Kingdom are divided into three categories, public, private, and international. The last two have provided their pupils with a range of sporting activity thanks to having experienced and specialized physical education (PE) teachers.
The problem, however, is with the public schools.
While boys’ public schools have been providing PE classes for many years, the focus is football-heavy and in many cases without any proper supervision. On top of this the schools rarely host tournaments or competitive play.
This year the Ministry of Education announced that public schools will include PE in every female school. This is brilliant and timely news, but it is a decision that creates a massive challenge.
First, there are a lack of women PE teachers due to there never having been a degree course designed to create female sports instructors. That is changing with universities such as Um Al-Qura in Makkah and Princess Nora University in Riyadh inaugurating one-year diploma programs. In the short term, however, small workshops took place this summer for women to get the basic grounding to enable them to teach PE to girls.
Due to lack of qualified and certified Saudi women graduates in PE, schools and universities believe that hiring foreigners, even if only temporarily, is the way to get children more active now.
Dr. Razan Baker
The second difficulty revolves around Ministry of Labor (MOL) rules and regulations regarding Saudization (the percentage of hiring Saudis in a workplace). Due to there not being many qualified and certified Saudi women graduates in PE, schools and universities believe that hiring foreigners, even if only temporarily, is the way to get children more active now. The country, however, is very strict over Saudization, and it can be tough to get around those rules.
Third, those who are qualified and have their coaching or training certificates from abroad are already working in a private gyms. In the bid to get our children active and into sport, PE teachers need to be full-time employees as government employees are not allowed to have two jobs.
Stats show that in 2012/2013 Saudi Arabia had 217 male PE supervisors monitoring 11,000 male PE teachers. Due to the huge ratio of teachers to supervisors the latter simply did not have time to really review if their instructions were taken into consideration by the former. If the men find it tough to have proper supervision and reporting then it will be doubly so for the women.
In that same academic year only, eight percent of the women who attended private and international schools had PE lessons, so 92 percent of girls only played sport if they made a personal effort to do so outside of the classroom.
While getting our children off the sofa and on the football pitches, tennis courts and gyms is not entirely the responsibility of the Ministry of Education, its role is crucial and the body can take a vital lead in setting the tone for the country and its citizens fo follow.
So are the Ministry and private schools going to make a compromise regarding the employment rules in order to allow experienced foreigners to teach PE in public schools, or even Saudis to work part-time? Are trained and certified Saudi females willing to volunteer for the sake of our country’s children? Or can the MOE, perhaps, invest in scholarships abroad for at least three months to get a comprehensive understanding of what is needed to teach PE from teachers in other countries?
Whatever happens, the importance of getting it right cannot be overstated, with the future of our children’s fitness and wellbeing at stake.
• Dr. Razan Baker is a member of the board of directors at the Saudi Bowling Federation, a specialist in corporate social responsibility in sports, and a sports columnist/journalist.
Twitter: @RazanBaker