I don’t know where to start

I recently stumbled across this article about the education sector from late November. The idiocy-per-word ratio is impressively high.

Over the past decade, the private sector, which consists primarily of for-profit schools, has grown dramatically to accommodate the large number of expatriates.

During the boom years the expatriate population surged rapidly and the number of private schools also increased. However, due to the time required to set up a new school, there was obviously a time lag between the surge in demand and the adjustment of supply following additional private sector investment. This has resulted in a shortage of school availability and rising fees.

Now, essentially for the first time, the expanding private school market is coming under the oversight of government education authorities, particularly in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, in an attempt to ensure uniform standards of quality.

I’ve previously blogged on the issues surrounding such government ‘oversight’. What caught my attention in this sentence is the use of the word ‘uniform’ instead of ‘minimal’. In the private provision of any good or service you are going to have variations in quality and this usually correlates with the price that you are willing to pay. For example, I know that a Kia will not be as good a car as a Mercedes, but I may still purchase the former because I know what I can afford and will thus decide on my best option. Unfortunately such common sense is rarely applied to the education sector, where for some reason the aim is for ‘uniform’ provision where the government decides what is best for you. Trying to make the market uniform will either make schooling unaffordable for many people; reduce standards to the lowest common denominator; or combine both outcomes in a messy ‘third way’.   Introducing ‘minimal’ standards would be more understandable, but again, one must also carefully consider the possibility that such regulation could increase the cost of schooling and thus make it unaffordable for some people.

“The main problem is there isn’t a public option for expatriate children,” says Dr Natasha Ridge, a researcher at the Dubai School of Government.

Hmmm. I’m not so sure about that Natasha. Given the well-documented issues with the public sector schools, I’m not sure how many expatriates would want to utilise that option even if it existed.

“The biggest issue is quality,” she adds, pointing out that wealthier families can send their children to better schools.

Good Lord! Wealthy people can afford higher-quality goods and services? What madness is this?

The Government must ensure private schools “do not take advantage of a captive market”, she insists.

Given what is involved in establishing or enlarging a school, supply is going to be inflexible in the short term.  When there is a dramatic upsurge in demand such as has occured in the UAE in recent years due to rapid population growth, this is going to result in significant price increases. The only reason that there would be a ‘captive market’ in the long term would be if there were barriers to entry in the private education market which restricted new supply. If onerous regulatory or legal obstacles to establishing new schools do not exist, then new competition will move into the market. Government intervention cannot magically solve this fundamental issue, and is more likely to just create more problems.

The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), the government body that regulates schools in Dubai, introduced wide-ranging school inspections for the first time last year, pegging fee increases to performance, and painting a grim picture of private education in the emirate.

Such regulatory interference is more likely to discourage further private investment into the educational sector, which will result in less competition in the long run, which helps no-one. Would you start a business when there was a risk that the government would dictate what price you could charge and whether you could increase it if required?

The KHDA’s involvement is also likely to have an unintended consequence: the prospect of future restrictions on fee changes means that whenever the option of increasing fees is available to a school, they will do so to the maximum extent possible due to the uncertainty about their future freedom of action.

KHDA inspection reports revealed a range of problems, from the use of corporal punishment in schools – a violation of UAE law – to poor provision in key subjects such as maths, science, English and Arabic. Only four schools were ranked as outstanding and more than half were judged to be merely meeting minimum standards.

The situation in Abu Dhabi may be worse: there are still some 70 private schools in the capital, catering for low-income communities, which operate out of villas.

The key phrase here is “low-income communities”; what precisely did they expect? Gilded palaces of learning?

Adec first pledged to shut these schools in September last year, but the challenge of finding alternatives for their pupils has made the process a lengthy and difficult one.

Funny that. The fact is that they are evidently the best option available within the budgetary constraints of the parents.  If you shut the schools down you are not magically going to have world-renowned schools offering to take these pupils at the same fee levels as the villa schools.

Despite the “grim picture of private education” though, it appears that it is still better than some options:

In Dubai, half the school-age Emirati population are now educated privately because many parents have lost faith in government schools. In Abu Dhabi, the figure is 40 per cent.

“We have seen a migration of students from public to private,” says Dr Abdulla al Karam, director general of the KHDA. “Now we have half of the nationals in the private schools. The worry is unless major steps are taken to reform the public education system in Dubai then this migration will continue to happen.”

So it seems that despite Natasha’s observations above, many of those who have got a “public option” have voted with their feet. Given this, the question that springs to mind is what on earth the KHDA is doing fiddling about with the private sector? It’s like Robert Mugabe giving a lecture on agricultural efficiency.

Most parents in the UAE also believe they are overpaying for education. A recent YouGov poll found that 88 per cent of parents with children in private schools and nurseries thought fees were excessive.

“It would be a lot less in the UK,” says Gerome Atkin, a Briton who works in construction. He pays Dh28,000 a year to send his daughter to a nursery four days a week.

“It seems like a lot of money, really, for very little. In general the school fees over here are quite ludicrous anyway. What surprises me, especially with the recession and everything else, is that fees have not gone down; in fact, they are putting them up.

“So people who are out here … are possibly being given less money due to the recession … but the price of Dubai in general is still skyrocketing. It just makes it very hard.”

Yes Gerome, it would be a lot less in the UK. However, a significant proportion of your income in the UK would be going to the government as tax so you’re not comparing like with like. As for the “price of Dubai still skyrocketing”, I can only imagine that you haven’t noticed the drastic fall in rents over the last 12 months.

With regard to the continuing rise in school fees, there are a number of factors to consider. First of all, education and healthcare tend not to be particularly cyclical sectors; the demand for schooling in the UAE has not dropped anywhere near as much as that for cars, for example. Furthermore, the recession does not mean that the operating costs of the schools have decreased: teachers tend to enjoy higher than average job security which means that their salaries have not fallen in line with the general labour market. This is compounded by the fact that most teachers here are expatriates and hired from overseas, with all the added expenditure that entails. Most schools also went into this academic year with real uncertainty over the number of pupils they would actually have, due to the potential for expatriate relocations over the summer. As a result they could not simply assume that there would be fewer students and embark on a round of radical cost-cutting. Finally, some of the schools and school groups had previously launched expansion programs in response to the high levels of demand. Just because the demand for these new projects has reduced does not mean that the costs go away. The original plan would have been for these costs to have been borne by new students, but with this no longer possible they will be reflected in increased school fees elsewhere.

Joined-up thinking

Emiratisation has been a buzz-word in the UAE for as long as I can remember: hardly a month goes by without some sort of conference, article or government initiative devoted to the issue. Unfortunately, this attention is not always combined with joined-up thinking when it comes to dealing with the issue.

This week’s announcement of a rise in public-sector pay has left many private companies wondering how they can afford to attract Emirati staff.

The 70 per cent increase in federal salaries is a realignment of a 2008 rise and will not affect nationals’ take-home pay. But it will dramatically increase their pension entitlements and future pay rises, making federal government jobs an even more attractive proposition than they are now.

Given such government largesse, the following statistics are therefore not surprising:

While Emiratis make up 54 per cent of employees in federal ministries, they account for less than one per cent of private-sector staff.

(…)

Because Emiratis command a premium salary for government work and prefer the social and cultural comfort zone a government job offers, many are unwilling to work for less in the private sector, often preferring long-term unemployment.

With an estimated 16,000 Emirati graduates entering the workforce every year, the unemployment rate among nationals is now about 13 per cent. At the same time, the country imports more than 80 per cent of the population to fill 90 per cent of its jobs.

Unlike many other countries, this situation is fairly sustainable economically due to the UAE’s accumulated oil wealth and ongoing oil income. The real question though is whether it is socially and culturally sustainable.

Feddah Abdulla Lootah, the acting director general of Tanmia, which oversees federal Emiratisation efforts, admitted high public-sector pay was a barrier. “Most Emiratis prefer to work in the government sector because of the pay; that is what we are facing now.” However, Ms Lootah added that pay was not the only concern. “They say government is more secure. In private-sector jobs, they always ask about performance and productivity.”

How unreasonable of them.

Tanmia was in the process of drafting suggestions for private companies to attract Emiratis without increasing pay, she said.

This is one of the things that annoys me about so much discussion of this issue: the assumption that it is the private sector that needs to change in order to fix a problem that is not of their making. The private sector is pretty occupied right now trying to create wealth amidst a global recession.

Something else in the article caught my attention:

The International Council on Security and Development interviewed 310 Emiratis between the ages of 16 and 26. (…) A large proportion of Emiratis considered secondary and higher education to be sub-par, saying it did not prepare them for the working world. More than a third decried a lack of adequate English skills as hampering their search for jobs. They also said they needed more practical career advice.

It really isn’t rocket science: equip people with the necessary skills to work in the private sector and don’t undermine the incentives to do so. It’s just a shame that this seems beyond some people.

A three-year-old pilot programme in state-run schools fails to adequately teach Arabic, which is a “breach of the Constitution”, a Federal National Council committee said yesterday.

(…)

In schools using the Madares al Ghad system, classes taught in Arabic have been reduced from seven to five per week and classes taught in English increased from six to 10.

Mathematics and science are taught in English. Less time is spent on rote memorisation and greater emphasis is placed on problem-solving and interactive learning.

The FNC committee’s report said this had “negatively affected teaching the Arabic language, which leads the committee to deem this as a deepening of foreign cultures.”

The question I would pose to the FNC is this: is local culture better served by a society in which the vast majority of its citizens are either unemployed or absorbed by a burgeoning public sector? Then again, logic does not seem to play a large part in these proceedings.

In April, principals of a number of schools under the Madares al Ghad programme complained during a meeting of the FNC committee that the teaching of science and maths in English was undermining the pupils’ Arabic skills.

One said the Arabic vocabulary of younger children was so poor that some could not name their body parts.

I’m sorry, but at some point parental responsibility has to rear its head here. Presumably Arabic is the language spoken at home, so why are they arriving at primary school lacking even the most basic vocabulary? In addition, a third of the week is still taught in Arabic under the new scheme, so what precisely are they doing in that time? Playing tiddlywinks?

The level of debate gets even better:

“Everyone talks about the needs of the job market to justify the need for English language,” said Yousef al Nuaimi, a member from Ras al Khaimah.

“If we’re talking about the labour market, why are some people who speak no English getting paid four times more than doctors who are taught in English?

I’m sorry, but this is just gibberish. Who are these people getting paid four times more than doctors? Are they in the public or private sector? Even if there is an actual case, such faulty generalisation is not a sound basis for national educational policy. If you employ this logic you could argue that as there are some very successful people (Alan Sugar, for example) who did not go to university, it therefore follows that higher education is not useful.

“We have imposed [English] everywhere. We go to malls and salesmen speak in English as if we are in a foreign country. Would that happen if we go to an Asian country?”

Er, quite possibly in many parts of Asia. Funnily enough, a lot of people around the world seem very keen to learn English in order to improve their economic prospects. Google ‘English schools in china’ for example and you’ll get around 47 million results. You are certainly far more likely to effectively communicate with a Vietnamese shop-keeper in English than in Arabic, which is really the whole point. I am not criticising the Arabic language and am certainly not claiming that English is an innately superior language; however, due to historical circumstances English now serves a vital role as the world’s second language. One can fulminate against this fact and the malign influence of foreign cultures, but this really doesn’t help anyone.

An Angry Woman

Every now and then you encounter a woman who does not really like other women and has very little time for notions of ’sisterhood’. Judging from this quote, Kathy Shaidle is one of those women…

Visiting Dubai?

There’s an article in the Guardian’s travel section today about Dubai that focuses on the ’boutique’ hotel market that seems to be developing here, albeit on a small scale. I was very pleased to see that two of the guesthouses mentioned are located in Bastakiya: when I was last wandering through that part of town I passed one of these hotels and remember thinking that this small guesthouse possessed infinitely more charm and character than Nakheel’s entire oeuvre. 

I’ve long felt that Dubai has not made enough use of its architectural heritage. Unfortunately, very little of ’Old Dubai’ still exists and that which does has had to be radically ’restored’ due to the nature of the traditional building materials (coral and mud) and the climate. In the (understandable) rush to modernise, the restoration of the crumbling traditional architecture was not a high priority. This meant that only a fraction of the original buildings survived.

A few developments have tried to draw inspiration from Bastakiya: Madinat Jumeirah and Old Town are probably the most notable. As nice as these are, they are ultimately conventional structures and developments dressed up with some indigenous stylistic flourishes. Don’t get me wrong, they are infinitely better than the generic Nakheel/Damac dross, but they lack the slightly higgledy-piggledy charm of Bastakiya with its narrow streets, maze-like layout and shaded courtyards. It’s just a shame that there is so little left of it.

A large section of Deira was apparently due for redevelopment as part of the Palm Deira lunacy development. Given the supreme unlikelihood of this project ever happening, perhaps the planners might like to take a pleasant wander through Bastakiya before they come up with their next scheme, if only to remind them that authenticity is far more cost-effective than artificial islands.

(If you are looking for photos of ‘Old Dubai’, this site is well worth a visit.)

Pedway to Heaven

A new idea from the RTA:

Dubai is planning to build air-conditioned walkways to link major buildings and encourage more people to walk around the city.

The walkways, called pedways, will link major buildings, shopping centres, metro stations and bus stops(.)

Unfortunately, no matter how ’pedestrian-friendly’ you make the streets of Dubai, the extreme summer temperatures mean that we are not all going to abandon our cars. In some areas though, air-conditioned walkways could be a viable option. I only wish they’d implemented it a decade ago. If a system like Calgary’s plus-15s had been integrated into the planning process early enough, then high-density areas such as Sheikh Zayed Road could have been built with this in mind and connected relatively easily. Alternatively, master developers could have been told that the large-scale high-density residential or commercial projects had to be designed with underground or air-conditioned pedestrian routes linked to designated public transport hubs. I know it is easy to be wise after the fact, but I’m sure that such regulations exist in other countries and could have been ‘borrowed’ by Dubai when the boom started. In addition, the summer heat is not something new and really ought to have been a major consideration in urban planning from the beginning. 

Septic Blatter

I never had much time for FIFA or Mr. Blatter, and that was before he started referring to himself in the third person at press conferences:

“I am not a prophet, so I don’t know what will happen after Blatter,” said the Swiss. “But please do not insist on technology. The day you stop a match and the referee takes the two captains to a monitor to see if something is inside, or outside the penalty box is the day the spectators will say no, we are not coming to the game.

“There will be no more discussion, if there’s no more discussion, then there is no more hope. With no more hope, there’s no more life, voila.”

I defy you to watch this video clip of Blatter and not laugh.

 

How did that turn out?

Do you remember the run-up to the Iraq War and the conspiracy theory that the invasion’s sole purpose was to enrich US oil companies?

US oil groups were all but shut out of Iraq as the country completed the biggest oil field auction in history at the weekend.

European groups, including Royal Dutch Shell, Lukoil and Gazprom, and Asian groups, such as China’s CNPC and Malaysia’s Petronas, were the main winners at Iraq’s second oil auction, which completed the sale of its large fields .

(…) Iraq has auctioned off more proved oil reserves than are held by the US, Mexico and UK combined.

 If that was the plan, the execution has been somewhat flawed.

There’s no news like bad news…

It’s interesting to note the contrasting reactions of the British press to the Dubai World debt freeze and yesterday’s $10 billion bail-out. The debt-freeze was front page news and opinion fodder for several days; the bail-out and timely repayment of the sukuk are rapidly relegated to the business pages. Indeed, the word ‘Dubai’ doesn’t appear at all on the Daily Telegraph landing page right now. I find this lack of attention interesting given that we were apparently on the verge of catastrophe a few weeks ago.

Could that be because a number of opinion writers have been made to look a tad silly? Or perhaps because the story doesn’t fit neatly into the simplistic ‘rise-and-fall’ narrative they’ve been so busy constructing?

Who left the lefties in charge?

 It may be petty of me, but I’m slightly amused by this news:

Guardian News & Media, publisher of The Guardian and The Observer, is expected to announce this week how many jobs are being axed in the latest round of cuts at the troubled newspaper group.

Up to 100 staff from the company’s 900-strong commercial and advertising department will be made redundant in the latest attempt to stem losses which currently run at £100,000 per day. Most of those affected have already been told their fate, but the deadline for the company to confirm individual redundancies passes today. (…) But there are already predictions that the job cuts will not be enough to return the company to profit following a disastrous year in which revenues have fallen by £33m.

Industry analysts have said the company needs a “root and branch” restructuring programme, with a much bigger reduction in staff numbers, if it is to have any hope of returning to profit, while Carolyn McCall, the chief executive of parent company Guardian Media Group (GMG), has already said losses at the newspapers are “not sustainable at their current levels”.

(It’s interesting how much of this description also applies to the country that The Guardian’s favourite political party has been governing for the last 12 years.)

There are signs that 2010 could be even worse than 2009. A change in Government after next year’s general election is likely to be disastrous for the Guardian’s revenue from public sector job adverts, on which it has long depended, as the Conservatives have strongly hinted they will save money by moving much of the advertising online.

GNM, which is heavily unionised, is owned by the Scott Trust, a charitable institution set up in 1936, and has never imposed compulsory redundancies on its editorial staff, resulting in what one insider described as “bed blockers” clinging on to highly-paid jobs.

The Scott Trust recently varied its agreement with editorial staff to allow compulsory redundancies “in dire economic circumstances”.

In August GMG reported that it had lost £89.8m, compared with a profit of £306.4m the previous year, though the 2008 profits were inflated by the one-off proceeds of selling 49.9pc of Trader Media Group, publisher of Auto Trader.

To quote Fawlty Towers, there’s enough material here for an entire conference, but I suppose that’s what happens when you try to run a business in line with even vaguely socialist principles: inefficiency; dead wood; and unsustainable dependence upon private and public subsidy. It is really quite delicious that George Monbiot’s eco-rants and Seamus Milne’s socialist clap-trap are partly funded by the profits made by the thoroughly environmentalist and Marxist-Leninist Auto Trader. What is less amusing is the effective taxpayer subsidy of The Guardian:

The Guardian currently dominates this market and, according to research by Reed Personnel Services, advertises two-thirds of public sector jobs. Its Wednesday Society section carries more than 30 pages of job ads each week, which could effectively disappear if the Tories got into power. The move would also hit titles such as Third Sector, Young People Now and Regeneration & Renewal, published by Brand Republic owner, Haymarket Publishing.

There’s more:

The government is being criticised for placing the majority of its recruitment advertising for public sector jobs with left-wing newspaper The Guardian.

A study by Nielsen Media Research showed that 26,175 out of 42,914 public sector jobs placed in national newspapers between January and September were advertised in The Guardian.

(…)

The government’s relationship with the Society supplement is already being closely watched by Labour critics, because the publisher is Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, former special adviser to Peter Mandelson, when he was a cabinet minister. Wegg-Prosser’s role, however is not an editorial one.

The COI Communications department handles advertising for public sector jobs and is responsible placing all 42,914 jobs. The 26,175 ads it places with The Guardian compares with Scotland’s Sunday Herald in second place with 7,586 ads and ethnic minority newspaper The Voice with 2,719. The Times newspaper takes 1,269, plus 1,255 in The Times Education Supplement and 802 in the Sunday Times. The Guardian’s rate card price for a full-page colour ad is £10,762, and a black-and-white page £7,762.

The Guardian has dismissed the criticism and called it unfounded. The paper pointed out that any talk of collusion with the current government was ridiculous and showed a lack of understanding of how the recruitment market, and the government’s involvement in it, worked.

A spokeswoman for The Guardian said: “So far this year, thousands of individual clients, with individual budgets, have advertised in Society Guardian. Those decisions are made independently and are based entirely on value for money and response rates. Those clients include Conservative and Liberal Democrat-controlled local authorities.”*

 Hmm. I’m not buying it, especially given that Mr. Wegg-Prosser eventually went from the Society Guardian to work with Tony Blair at No.10. (Looking at Mr. Wegg-Prosser’s Linked-In profile for some reason makes me think of Lord Turner’s ‘socially useless’ comment about the banking industry – not sure why.)

If it isn’t a conspiracy, it’s certainly a cock-up and a massive waste of public money. Needless to say, the Tories have already proposed the following:

The Conservative Party has promised to overhaul advertising for public sector jobs in a move that could potentially hit The Guardian newspaper.  Shadow chancellor George Osborne has vowed to move all public sector job ads from newspapers to a new official website if his party comes to power after the next general election.  This plan could result in newspapers, particularly The Guardian’s Wednesday Society section, losing around £790m spent by local and central government on job ads each year. The dedicated public sector website would only cost an estimated £5m.

If anything, £5 million is a bit on the high side when services like madgex exist, which provide a ready-made and scalable job board system that powers such notable online portals as, you guessed it, Guardian Jobs. It’s actually quite scandalous when you consider how much public money was unnecessarily diverted to subside The Guardian; no wonder they don’t fancy the idea of public sector cuts.

Oh well, I suppose at least The Guardian pays tax on any profits it makes out of all this. After all, its been pretty vociferous in its criticism of tax havens and those evil tax dodging corporations. 

Tax Justice campaigners had a small demonstration outside the Guardian’s offices today to protest at the hypocrisy of the Guardian campaigning for FTSE 100 companies to pay more corporation tax when, despite GMG making £300 million in profits last year, it paid none itself. GMG took advantage of a perfectly legal loophole to avoid paying taxes on the capital gains made on the sale of Auto Trader. Without exploiting the law they would have had to pay more than £50 million in tax!

(More on this hypocrisy here, here and here.)

The final insult from the newspaper that attacks the fat cats and their ‘rewards for failure’?

The newspapers have been in financial turmoil since the Guardian’s editor in chief, Alan Rusbridger, decided to move the papers from broadsheet to the current medium-sized Berliner format in 2005.

(…)

Despite the losses, Mr Rusbridger received an 11pc pay rise last year to £445,000.

(* – Apologies for the age of these articles. I tried in vain to find more up-to-date information. If anyone has more statistics on this let me know; however, I don’t think a great deal has changed, although one would imagine the number of public sector appointments might have fallen in the last year.)

The Credit Crunch must be over…

In difficult economic times such as these, it is heartening to see that there are still some people who just don’t give a damn:

The world’s largest chandelier is being installed in a new office building on Doha’s Corniche, it has been reported.

I think we’ve just found the apotheosis of ‘bling’. I love the fact that it’s in an office building, and that the designer’s name is ‘Beau’.

Measuring some 38.5 metres long and 12.5 metres wide, the Reflective Flow chandelier is much larger in size than the one in the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Oman, which is said to be the world’s biggest.

The Qatari capital’s chandelier will weigh 20,000kg once completed, the Gulf Times reported on Wednesday.

According to its designer, Beau McClellan, despite its size the chandelier will only use the power of about 70 standard light bulbs when fully lit due to its use of 55,000 energy-saving LEDs.

“The chandelier will react to a person’s mood as they enter the building and display a subliminal moon effect … or lava, or a lightning bolt. If there are more people, there is more content,” she told the paper.

Wow – a mind-reading chandelier.  I could be wrong, but I’d imagine the mood of most people when they enter the building and see the object in question will be a curious mixture of shock, bewilderment and revulsion.

I can’t wait to see what subliminal lava looks like.

The chandelier is also made up of 2,300 crystals, each covered in glass with a special reflective coating to reflect light, colour and movement.

“When light is introduced behind the glass frames, the unique coating becomes either fully- or semi-transparent, allowing the sculpture to transform into an incredible ever-changing light piece,” McClellan said.

The building is set to open in April 2010.