KHDA School Inspections, What to Expect, Plus 2017/18 Fee Impact
The annual KHDA inspection reports are due out this week. SchoolsCompared.com has been keeping its ear to the ground so that we can give you advance notice of what we expect to see.
What to expect
All Dubai schools – other than those rated Outstanding in the last round of inspections – have again been inspected in the 2016-17 academic year. The Outstanding schools have been permitted to self-evaluate this year and to work with schools in needs of support to coach them through the self-evaluation process. Indian school Inspection reports were released in March; the latest round are for the other curricula – mainly UK, US, IB and a range of non-Asian curricula.
We expect the focus of the inspectors to have been particularly on the National Agenda items – Innovation, the introduction of UAE Social Studies for all students up to the end of grade 8/year 9, the on-going focus on Arabic proficiency and Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) provision in schools.
Another major area of concentration is the expansion of external testing and curriculum bench-marking which will be a requirement for all schools and curricula. Over recent years, the KHDA has required schools to participate in PISA and TIMSS testing (2 international benchmarking tests in English, Maths and Science) and set standards that UAE schools are expected to achieve by 2021.
Increasingly schools will be expected to carry out standardised tests or evaluations that are part of their national curriculum (such as SATS tests for the UK and MAPS testing for US curriculum), but also report against public examinations or tests appropriate to each curriculum for which minimum curriculum attainment standards with specific levels should be achieved – find out more here.
This will create a degree of transparency for parents which is unprecedented – schools will be required to provide full details of the results that their students achieve.
At the same time, the Regulator is demanding that schools become ever more skillful at evaluating their own performance through self-evaluation. This is at the core of each inspection, with inspectors assessing the schools against their own perception of their performance. Schools that are not able to accurately evaluate how they are supporting their students across all the key criteria are being “marked down” this year.
The impact on fees
The KHDA announced the approved fee increases at the time of the release of the Indian Inspection reports which are as follows:
Outstanding schools can increase fees up to 4.8% ( ECI x 2.00)
Very Good schools can increase fees up to 4.2% ( ECI x 1.75)
Good schools can increase fees by up to 3.6% (ECI x 1.50)
Schools rated Acceptable and below, may increase their fees by 2.4%.
On the next page is the list of newly announced fees for 2017/18. Please note that there are some schools whose fees have not yet been increased, but who have applied for adjustment.
Next page: 2017/18 School Fees
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