BUILDING A FUTURE-STATE OPERATING MODEL TO PREPARE STUDENTS FOR POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION

Abdulaziz AlOthman

Eng. Abdulaziz AlOthman, Gulf Studies Center, Kuwait, Aziz.Alothman89@gmail.com

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Abstract

Education expenditure in the GCC, as a proportion of total government spends, is among the highest in the world. According to UNDP reports, total GCC governments spending on education in 2015 reached US$95 billion and the fastest growing private education market globally, with private school revenues to triple by 2020 to US$17 billion, yet the quality of education is struggling and reforms have to be considered.

The first part of the paper discusses the leadership development and support where both public and private schools across three GCC countries were selected to analyze how they keep their high school students on track for post-secondary success by analysing the student data to assess the school performance. This paper discusses the potential of designing a holistic framework to identify potential school leaders early and create long-term development pathways through:

• Defining talent and leadership in a competency model to create shared understanding of the leaderships skills, experiences and behaviors critical to education system success.
• Designing the right predictive method to identify a pool of aspirant leaders early, creating long-term development pathways, and differentiating the blueprint framework to suit the nuances of different career stages and cohorts.

The next step to explore is the understanding of the current leadership capability and the readiness of future leaders through identifying the areas of strength and development needs across leadership capability areas and equipping individuals and their leader (school principal) with the skills to objectively assess their strengths and development needs, select development that best suits them, and track their development across their career.

The second part of the research will consist of building an effective operating model through analyzing the economics of education across the GCC, building a strategy & implementation plan, look into the different funding models that public schools depend on globally by encompassing benchmarking of all sources of revenue for the education institutions in the council. In order to come up the desired results, some initial hypothesis on potential cost optimization were proposed for possible implementation. The hypothesis is to divide the operating model into:

• Operating Cost Optimization:

The optimization process would consist of rationalizing faculty headcount based on internal mandates and observed relevant benchmarks on Student-teacher ratio and class size. Another approach would be opening up the public education system to non-national students by offering bilingual/international curriculum to improve capacity utilization. The idea behind this would identify ways to rationalize teacher mix by qualification. For instance, reducing qualification requirements for non-core subject teachers based on internal mandates and observed relevant benchmarks on admin staff to student ratio.

• Capital Cost Optimization:

Capital Costs are dependent on the capital investment governments are putting into the education system, hence the paper will explore opportunities to reduce common costs across segments using observed relvant benchmarks, such as the cost of furniture and equipment. In addition, leveraging the use of technology (front and back of the classroom) would be researched to optimize requirement.

Keywords: public education, post-secondary education, investment returns, donations, innovative education, tuition revenues, digital learning