Ammon News - The Regional Center for Quality and Excellence in Education (UNESCO - RCQE), jointly with the Arab Organization for Quality Assurance in Education (AROQA), organized the ‘School Accreditation in the Arab Region’ forum.

The virtual event was co-chaired by AROQA Chairman, Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, and RCQE Director General, Abdulrahman Almedaries.

The two-day forum saw the participation of a host of experts and specialized researchers in accreditation and quality education fields from several Arab countries, according to an AROQA press statement.

The forum aimed to reach joint perspectives on enhancing quality of school accreditation systems in the Arab region as well as submitting proposals to develop the regional research project outputs (school accreditation systems and their means of development in the Arab countries) to come up with recommendations to education ministries and decision-makers in the Arab countries to boost the quality of school accreditation systems, said the statement.

In the opening speech, Abu-Ghazaleh stressed the importance of forming active educational committees to meet the current Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic challenges that clearly affected the education sector, affirming the need to shift towards innovation and creativity to support the process of quality and accreditation, thereby achieving distinctive educational outputs that would reflect positively on the students and the society.

Abu-Ghazaleh, who chaired many standards-setting committees on ISO, accounting and education, underlined the need of a special standard for "shifting from teaching to learning" for the purpose of innovation, in addition to another standards that involve providing teachers with the necessary skills to keep pace with change.

Meanwhile, Abu-Ghazaleh stated that AROQA, (under the honorary chairmanship of the Secretary-General of the League of the Arab States), provides its quality services in education for the purpose of innovation and it monitors and controls standards of quality in education, noting that the Organization also focuses on raising students’ awareness on the importance of quality standards and indicators and the need to apply them.

For his part, Almedaries said the forum was held to discuss school accreditation development project, school accreditation systems in the Arab region and means for development, in addition to the international and regional practices in school accreditation.

Furthermore, Almedaries pointed to the need to keep abreast with the surrounding changes, especially since the quality and accreditation are major topics at the global level for the development of educational outputs, compatible with the labor market and investment requirements needs.

"Today, we are focusing on life skills, hence the importance of developing education and its systems by establishing an active structure of school accreditation." he added.

For their part, participants expressed their thanks and appreciation to AROQA and UNESCO Center for organizing the forum, where they reviewed the outputs of a study conducted by experts on school accreditation in several Arab and foreign countries.

Participants also discussed the requirements and obstacles of applying school accreditation standards to ensure the quality of distance learning in private schools as well as international accreditation in education, in addition to the characteristics of school accreditation, quality and the need of shifting towards innovation and creativity.