2. Adopting decentralization in education, standardizing education departments, consolidating their scopes, and giving them the authority needed to carry out their work. In other words, schools and the ministry are indivisible; responsibility starts and ends with the school.
3. Creating an independent and neutral evaluation authority that assesses the public and private sectors by setting and overseeing standards.
4. Positioning kindergartens as the foundation of education. At the time, only 6.7% of children went through this important stage of education, compared to our goals of about 50%. This necessitated private sector involvement and investments to help increase the number of educators. Using these four pillars as our starting point, we began preparations and took the steps needed to achieve our goals. One of the biggest challenges we faced at this stage, however, was convincing officials both within and outside of the ministry of how important it was to get the legislation we needed to build the framework for meaningful sustainable development. This was an arduous process that involved briefing ministries, forming ministerial committees, obtaining stakeholders’ approvals, holding meetings, and, finally, making decisions. Our mission for the coming years started here, and we hoped we were well-positioned to head further down the path of modernization and development. I recall the first official letter that my colleagues Norah Al Faiz, Faisal Al Muammar, Khalid Al Sabti, and I drafted, before I submitted it for royal approval. I was eager to personally give the letter to King Abdullah so that I could explain the basis of the directions that we laid out. I wanted to highlight that this was a practical, forward-looking concept that would ensure sustainable and value-added investment in the generations to come. King Abdullah had hardly had any time to meet and discuss the letter because of back-to-back trips to Qatar and London for the G20 Summit. I would ask him every day if he had a moment to review the letter until finally, one day I was able to catch him in the hotel before he departed. He was exhausted after a series of G20 meetings, but nonetheless invited me for a one-on-one dinner. I thanked him and told him that I would be grateful if I could read him the letter and explain how it fulfills the tasks he had assigned me. One of the main objectives of the letter was obtaining a royal directive to set up a ministerial committee made up of officials from the Ministry of Higher Education, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Petroleum, Saudi Aramco, and the Ministry of Education. The goal of this committee was to propose the necessary legislation to set up Tatweer and its affiliates to support investment in the knowledge economy. This wwould generate the competitiveness, accountability, and governance required to further invest in education and create the desired space for knowledge investment. Given governmental bureaucracy, the changes we sought to enact took time, but we tried tirelessly to expedite the process. The goal was to comport the ministry towards these directions by setting up the necessary mechanisms and promoting legislation that we needed. The effort culminated in the King Abdullah Education Development Program, which is based on updating curricula and extracurricular activities, developing a sturdy but flexible infrastructure, training, and leveraging new technologies.
For this program to be successful, we requested that Tatweer companies be set up and run by top specialists in each company’s areas of focus, to ensure the highest level of efficiency, governance, and
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