An Investigation into the Implementation of the Citizenship Component of the Tatweer Policy in Three Primary Schools in Saudi Arabia

Reforming schools has been a major challenge in countries like Saudi Arabia where deep cultural values and norms influence the cultural life of schools and the interactions of different stakeholders with school initiatives. However, since the attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, hereafter referred to as 9/11, the education authorities in Saudi Arabia have expressed the intention to encourage change through introducing the Tatweer education reforms to promote citizenship education. Although the purpose of promoting the Tatweer Policy is to enhance productivity and school performance, the education authorities have been hoping for a betterment of the quality of citizenship education to bring about the best outcomes in schools. Indeed, many schools including primary schools have adopted Tatweer with the hope of improving the practices of staff and students and the school’s performance. However, there is still a lack of evidence regarding how the schools are implementing the programme and what experiences the main stakeholders involved in the policy implementation – namely students, teachers and headteachers – have enjoyed. In light of this, this research aims to investigate the citizenship curriculum as formulated by the Ministry of Education (MoE) in Saudi Arabia and the required approach to its teaching as prescribed by the Tatweer methodology in primary schools. In pursuit of this primary aim, headteachers, teachers and pupils participated in the empirical data collection process to examine the implementation of state policy, its purpose, and the logic underpinning its principles and its practice.

By adopting a pure interpretivist–qualitative approach, the research involved three different primary schools, carrying out semi-structured interviews and a limited number of detailed fieldnotes with students, teachers and headteachers. The outcomes of the research suggested that although schools were positive towards change, a set of cultural, environmental and practical obstacles have hindered the programme’s implementation and prevented schools from generating its expected benefits. The major struggles seemed to be with centralization and bureaucracy, with the implementation of Tatweer requiring a more desterilized education system where teachers and headteachers can use their powers of authority to forge a connection with the community surrounding the schools, and indeed, to bring more autonomy to classroom practices. Leadership is problematic, especially with the schools’ failure to activate the role of “Team of Excellence” for practicing a more distributed style of leadership. Training is another factor identified by teachers and head teachers in the research, where the focus should be on improving the knowledge and skills needed to implement Tatweer within the schools. The research suggests that the educational authority needs to support the country’s schools and provide the required training and education, reducing the amount of administrative work so that teachers and head teachers can organize their time to engage the students and activate the positive values of citizenship education.