The Politics of Teacher Policies Reforms in the Arab Gulf States: A Comparative Study

In the past two decades, the Arab Gulf States have introduced several educational reforms, seeking to improve the quality of their education systems in a drive to diversify their economies. Despite heavy investment by the Kuwaiti government in education reform, its implementation of teacher policies reform has had limited success. To explore and understand why Kuwait has not implemented any reforms related to teacher policies in the past ten years, this study compares the process of teacher policies reform in Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain and investigates the variations among the three countries. The research is approached through the lenses of different policymaking theories, specifically the Institutional theory and the Multiple Streams theory, as its main focus is to study education reform in the three countries from a political perspective. It employs a qualitative comparative study, analysing key policy documents and consultancy reports, as well as interviewing policymakers and faculty members in Kuwait’s education colleges, to gather relevant data. The three countries shared similar aims and agendas for reforming their education systems, including teacher policies, and all three relied on international consultants in developing the reforms, but the significant difference concerned the degree of emphasis on reforming teacher policies; in Kuwait, this received much less focus than in Qatar and Bahrain. Guided by the Most Similar System Design, three explanatory factors were identified: the ruling establishment’s degree of motivation for reform, the stability of the administration responsible for the reform, and the extent of stakeholder involvement in the process. Bahrain and Qatar had highly motivated ruling establishments, stable administrations, and extensive stakeholder involvement, thus facilitating reform, whilst these factors were absent/weak in Kuwait. Therefore, this research argues that these three factors are closely related to the outcome of interest and explain why Kuwait was less successful with teacher policies reforms