How the UAE is compressing a century of institutional learning

How the UAE is compressing a century of institutional learning

For much of modern educational history, the world's most admired schools appeared to embody a simple truth: enduring quality took time. The UK's Eton College, founded in 1440 by Henry VI, had nearly six centuries to become Eton. Phillips Exeter Academy, established in 1781 by John and Elizabeth Phillips, had more than two centuries to become Exeter. Their reputations were built not in a single act of founding but through decisions made and remade over generations.

Strip away the ceremony, and much of what we call institutional tradition is accumulated experience—a memory of what worked, what failed, and what was worth preserving. After working across education systems in more than a dozen countries around the globe, I had accepted that there were few shortcuts. A school could open quickly. Buildings could be completed, teachers recruited, and students enrolled. But reputation was different. Excellence had to be earned slowly.

The UAE has made me less certain about that idea.

Experience versus age

Age, by itself, does very little for an institution. What matters is whether experience improves judgment, and whether that judgment becomes part of the institution rather than disappearing when individuals leave—a collective memory, not an individual one. That raises a more interesting question: if experience is what matters, can a young institution acquire it faster? The UAE suggests that it can.

Dubai now has more than 230 private schools operating across 17 curricula. In the 2023-24 inspection cycle, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority inspected 209 schools, rating 23 as Outstanding, 48 as Very Good, 85 as Good, 51 as Acceptable, and just two as Weak. Overall, 81 per cent of students attended schools rated Good or better—a figure that has climbed steadily from 70 per cent in 2018-19 to 77 per cent in 2022-23.

The scale is notable, but the more consequential feature is the environment in which those schools operate. Performance is visible. Parents have considerable choice and use it. University matriculation is published. Regulators regularly enter schools and make public judgments about what they find. School leaders arrive from education systems around the world, carrying with them lessons learned elsewhere. Together, these create a feedback architecture fast enough that the system notices what works before a slow cycle of trial and error ever would.

Inheriting knowledge

A new school therefore does not have to discover everything for itself. It can inherit experience before it has accumulated much of its own, so that weaknesses are identified while they are still correctable and good leadership compresses years of trial and error into a fraction of the time.

The improvements extend beyond headline metrics. In the 2023-24 inspection cycle, 76 per cent of Dubai private schools achieved Good or higher ratings for inclusive education, a figure that has been rising steadily. This demonstrates that quality gains are broad-based, touching specialized areas that traditionally take years to develop.

I have watched this happen through my work. The results are important, but what interests me more is how quickly the habits behind them became established. Expectations ceased to require explanation, teachers learned from previous cohorts, and decisions made in one year shaped those made in the next—until a school that was still young in chronological terms began to display some of the characteristics normally associated with much older institutions.

One young school producing unusually strong results might simply be an outlier, but seeing comparable habits take root in another young institution thousands of miles away suggests that something more transferable may be involved.

Beyond schools

The pattern extends to higher education. The UAE was recognized as the most improved higher education system in the Arab region according to the QS World University Rankings: Arab Region 2026, with a 33 per cent improvement rate. Khalifa University climbed from 177th to 147th in the QS World University Rankings 2027, becoming the first UAE institution to break into the global top 150.

The UAE also ranked 17th globally in the QS World Future Skills Index 2027, leading the Arab region in future-ready higher education. QS data forecasts that international student enrollment in the UAE will approach 120,000 by the end of the decade, with nine of the region's top 10 universities for international faculty already based in the UAE.

Even the regulatory system demonstrates adaptive learning. KHDA paused full school inspections for the 2024-25 and 2025-26 academic years, conducting only targeted quality assurance visits as part of an evolving approach to supporting quality education, before resuming comprehensive inspections in 2026-27.

Implications for institutional development

This possibility matters well beyond schools. Governments around the world are investing enormous sums in institutions they hope will endure—universities, research centres, hospitals and cultural organisations among them—while investors increasingly place long-term capital behind the physical and social infrastructure that supports them. Yet we still tend to think about institutional maturity as though it were governed principally by the calendar.

History matters, of course. The character of Eton or Exeter cannot be reproduced by importing a name, constructing a campus or hiring an impressive founding team, and nor should anyone pretend otherwise. But history and learning are not the same thing. Much of what takes an institution decades to acquire is practical knowledge—when to intervene, what not to change, which standards cannot be compromised, and how to recognize trouble before it becomes institutionalized—and in older organisations that knowledge accumulated slowly simply because there was no other way for it to accumulate.

A younger institution operating today does not necessarily face the same constraint. It can borrow experience, observe institutions elsewhere, and subject itself to scrutiny earlier in its life, and most important, it can build the habit of remembering what it learns. That changes the significance of age.

Perhaps great institutions have traditionally taken generations not because there is anything indispensable about the passage of generations themselves, but because that was simply how long it took institutions to know enough—and the experiment taking place in the UAE suggests that some of that time can be compressed.

Nations competing to build universities, hospitals, companies and public institutions may discover that one of their greatest advantages has little to do with the amount of capital they can deploy. It is how quickly they learn, together.