A comparative analysis of policies, strategies and programmes for information and communication technology integration in education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the republic of Ireland

The Saudi 2030 Vision (السعودیة 2030) launched in 2016, with plans to reduce the country’s dependence on oil as the main income generator, and instead diversify into other economic sectors (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2016a). The Saudi 2030 Vision articulated a series of goals and accompanying programmes that aimed to bring about reforms across a broad range of systems, including education, to enable Saudi citizens to come to terms culturally with the new plans while also enabling them to become active participants in the necessary societal and economic transformations in a post-oil economy. Within the various plans contributing to the Saudi 2030 agenda, including the National Transformation Programme, 2016–2020 (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2016b), technology was frequently cited as a key agent in facilitating change and education was targeted as a means of enabling Saudi citizens to develop a broad range of new competencies, including digital skills, that aligned particularly with the new economic vision for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It was within the context of these developments that the genesis of this idea to review ICT in education’ policies, strategies and programmes that were active in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2016 was born, and this ultimately progressed to become a full-fledged comparative review of ICT in education’ policies, strategies and programmes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland (ROI).

This study engaged in a comparative analysis of ICT policy and programmes across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland, and the reasons for choice of these jurisdictions were three-fold. Firstly, it was important to benchmark the ICT in education’ policies, strategies and programmes in KSA with those from a western country with a track record in ICT policy implementation, and the ROI had actively engaged in ICT integration in education since the 1970s so was deemed suitable in this respect. Secondly, the Irish Higher Education Authority (2017) reported that the KSA was ranked as third largest country of origin (in a list of the top five countries outside the European Economic Area) for international students enrolled in Irish universities, and the majority of these students had government scholarships from the KSA. This suggested learning in, and from, the Irish education system was highly valued at governmental levels within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and thus further contributed to this warrant to conduct the comparative analysis of the respective ICT in education’ policies and practices of the KSA and ROI. Thirdly, the researchers of this study came from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland, and both lectured and researched in ICT-enabled learning within higher education institutions, so they had a personal interest in the comparative analysis ICT policy implementation in education within and across both jurisdictions. To help set the context, an overview of the landscape of ICT integration in education-related policies and programmes within these national contexts is presented herein.

The overarching research question for this study was to compare and contrast policies, strategies and/ or programmes (active in 2016) aimed at enhancing the integration of ICT in primary and post-primary education settings in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland, with a view to identifying similarities and/ or differences in the framing of these and discussing implications of same. The sub-research questions were framed as follows:

The methodology of this study utilized Kozma’s (2008) Framework for Comparative Analysis of ICT Policy to critically review policies, strategies and/ or programmes (active in 2016) that sought to enhance ICT integration in education in two settings, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Republic of Ireland. In his framework for comparative analysis, Kozma (2008) suggested four policy rationales that can facilitate an analysis of the vision or purpose of ICT policy, and a further five operational elements that can be used for analysis of ICT programme/s. The four high-level policy rationales were to be viewed as visions embedded within the strategic policy, such as: supporting economic growth, promoting social development, advancing education reform and supporting education management. Kozma (2008) acknowledged that some policies can combine two or more of these rationales, and thus a fifth element ‘Multiple Rationales’ component can be added to capture this. In terms of the operational elements that could be compared and contrasted across ICT programmes in education, Kozma (2008) included: Infrastructure Development, Teacher Training, Technical Support, Pedagogical and Curricular Change, and Content Development. Kozma (2008) further recommended some other components that can be used in the analysis of ICT action plan and/or programmes and these include: Policy Alignment, Distributed Policies, Private-Public Partnerships and Evaluation of Strategic Level. Kozma’s (2008) framework thus provided the units of comparative analysis (as illustrated in Fig. 1) for this critical review.

The analysis of ICT integration within and across the national policies and related programmes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland was undertaken through the application of Kozma’s (2008) framework for comparative analysis of ICT policy. The overall process of analysing the active policies and programmes across both jurisdictions was thus framed by examination of Kozma’s (ibid) two main categories of ‘Policy Rationales’ and ‘Operational Components’, with further exploration of what Kozma categorised as ‘Other’ – namely, alignment of policies and programmes, partnership model/s and evaluation planning. The aforementioned units of analyses (articulated within each category of Kozma’s 2008 frame for comparative analysis of ICT policy as illustrated in Table 1) formed the structure for the review process, with the ICT policies and programmes in each jurisdiction coded and categorised accordingly, and further guided the focus of the resultant analysis of policies. In this regard, the ICT policies and programmes were reviewed for evidence of: underpinning rationale/s for the ICT policy including whether the policy/ plan primarily sought to support economic growth, promote social development, advance the reform of education and/ or support education management. Furthermore, there was a review of the operational components of policies including whether there was reference to support for and promotion of ICT infrastructure development, teacher training in ICT, technical support, pedagogical and curricular change and content development vis-à-vis ICT integration in education. Finally, the policies and related programmes were reviewed to see whether there existed alignment of ICT policies and programmes within and across the target countries, or whether there were distributed policies, whether public-private partnerships were established to support the integration of ICT, and whether there was explicit integration of evaluation processes for the strategic level indicators. Therefore, Kozma’s (2008) framework for comparative analysis of ICT Policy allowed for the findings for both jurisdictions to be drawn together for comparison and critique.

The national policies, strategies and programmes relating to ICT in education were sourced from a search of governmental websites in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland, and further searches were conducted within websites of international organisations/ bodies (including: World Bank, UNESCO, EU) and within academic databases (including: Wiley, Springer, Emerald) to identify reports on the implementation of ICT policies in the primary and post-primary education systems (during the timeframe of review in 2016). The key search terms used included: ICT in education, acts, policies, strategies, plans, programmes, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, evaluation of ICT in education. At a national level, this resulted in the identification of four relevant documents for each jurisdiction (active at the time of study in 2016) as listed in Table 1 relating to the framing and implementation of ICT in education policies, strategies and programmes in the aforementioned countries.

In the Saudi context, there was very limited information available publicly or in academic literature on the review of the implementation of ICT in education’ policies, strategies or practices, with the “Report of the General Project for Curriculum Development” (2012) for example being the most recent, publicly available evaluation report at the time of this study, of the General Project for Curriculum Development (1998). Similarly, within the Irish context, there was very little information available publicly or in academic literature of the ICT in education’ policies, strategies or programmes active in 2016, which perhaps was less surprising as many of these were still in the early stages of being implemented at the time of the review.

In terms of both the Saudi and Irish contexts, the review of rationales underpinning policies, strategies and programmes focusing on ICT integration in primary and post-primary education, perhaps unsurprisingly found evidence of a primary focus on using ICT integration to progress the type of educational reform that would enhance economic growth across both countries, with social development more visible within the Irish policy framework. This speaks to national agendas in both jurisdictions that sought to mobilise ICT integration in education to prepare a work-force for the knowledge economy. Furthermore, the importance of partnership was evident within the formation and implementation of policies, strategies and programmes, evidenced by partnerships across governmental departments and consultation with stakeholders across education, industry and civil society sectors within each jurisdiction.

The Saudi government mandated through their policies that Saudi teachers adopt ICT in their practice, highlighting the importance of ICT integration in education within the General Project for Curriculum Development (MoE, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 1998), committing to dedicated support for ICT integration through the Tatweer project (MoE, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2007), and affirming commitments and allocating resources through their Ministry of Economic and Planning for the wider integration ICT in education at a national level through the 10th National Development Plan (2015–2019) and National Transformation Program (2016–2020). The Irish Department of Education and Skills (2015b) further sought to enable a triple agenda of economic growth, educational reform and social development through its implementation of the “Digital Strategy for Schools” (2015–2020) and associated innovative operational components, such as the Digital Learning Framework, that aimed to fundamentally change the manner in which ICT was integrated at school level to ensure that learners developed not only key ICT skills but also broader competencies (including: communication skills, interpersonal skills, creativity) that contributed to their personal and social development through more holistic approaches to ICT integration in the learning environment.

The monitoring and assessment of progress vis-à-vis ICT integration in education was articulated within the framing of the policies, strategies and programmes in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland, however, very few evaluation reports were available from governmental sources in either country. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the monitoring of the effectiveness or otherwise of plans and programmes was anecdotally reported to have been undertaken for all programmes, and indeed the review of the General Project for Curriculum Development (1998-current) undertaken by the Ministry of Education (2012) constituted evidence of one such evaluation. However, information from the evaluation at Saudi governmental levels of the other strategies and programmes were not located, perhaps because they were not publicly available beyond the relevant Saudi Ministry with responsibility for the relevant programme. Interestingly, Albugami and Ahmed (2015b, online) claimed that in the case of the National Strategy for the Development of Education - King Abdullah Project for General Education Development, or Tatweer project, (MoE, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2007) that there was no evidence of evaluation of ICT enabled learning at the time of their literature review which was undertaken 8 years after the implementation of the Tatweer project for integrating ICT in Saudi schools.

However, some insights on the success or otherwise of the Saudi ICT in education initiatives over the past two decades were found within academic literature. In their small-scale study of ICT implementation in Saudi secondary schools, Albugami and Ahmed (2015a) highlighted the weak communications and monitoring processes as central issues in the translation of Saudi ICT in education policy into practice, noting that ‘although there is a Saudi ICT educational policy, it is not well communicated, implemented and re-enforced. Its application is also weak at classroom level’ (p.47). In their literature review of ICT implementation in Saudi schools, Albugami and Ahmed (2015b, online) further highlighted several other factors that were hindering ICT in education implementation, including ‘inadequate management and organizational support, inadequate training, negative teachers’ attitudes towards educational technology, cultural factors, and insufficient infrastructure’. Busays Alghamdi (2018) and Alghamdi (2019) doctoral research studies both offered insights into the integration of technology in an albeit very small number of Saudi primary and post-primary schools that participated in the Tatweer project (2007–2023). According to Busays Alghamdi following the review of the General Project for Curriculum Development (1998) by the Ministry of Education in 2012, the MoE did relinquish some control in what has been framed as the second phase of the Tatweer project, by allowing schools some autonomy in relation to identifying their own needs with respect to ICT in integration and governmental support being provided to address the individual needs of these schools. However, Busays Alghamdi (2018) asserted that progress enabled through this school-based model was stifled by lack of stakeholder participation throughout the curriculum design process. In this regard, Busays Alghamdi (2018) claimed there was a need for enhanced stakeholder engagement (teachers, school heads, students and policy-makers) across the process of planning, designing and implementing curriculum re-orientation for successful ICT integration in education. While generalisations cannot be made from these studies, Busays Alghamdi (2018) and Alghamdi (2019) also pointed to issues in the meaningful integration of ICT in the reviewed Tatweer schools, and asserted that there was a need for more teacher professional development in ICT integration in education and ICT skills, and to upgrade equipment and provide technical support.

The detailing of evaluation strategies, in the form of performance indicators, within certain Irish policies and programmes was extensive and sought at its core to be able to measure progress with respect to the integration ICT in education. However, similar to the KSA context, there was a paucity of information from these evaluations available for review from governmental levels on the Action Plan for Education (2016–2019), ICT Skills Action Plan (2014–2018), Digital Strategy for Schools (2015–2020) and the Framework for Junior Cycle (2015), with reliance on limited academic literature and other sources to gain some insights into how these were being evaluated and their impact on ICT integration at primary and post-primary schools. For example, Cosgrove et al. (2019) evaluation of the Digital Learning Framework, one aspect of the Digital Strategy for Schools (2015–2020), was useful with respect to enabling better understanding the impact of this operational component of integration ICT in schools. However, in the absence of publicly available information, it was necessary to review the follow-up strategy to the ICT Skills Action Plan (2014–2018) to glean information on its performance. In this regard, within the “Technology Skills 2022: Ireland’s Third ICT Skills Action Plan” the DES (2019) acknowledged the success of its predecessor in enabling increased uptake of third level ICT-related courses but provided minimal information on the effectiveness of ICT integration at school level, referring instead to the uptake of post-primary students of ICT summer and autumn camps, and the inclusion of coding and computer science as courses at post-primary levels. Interestingly, the DES planned that the Framework for Junior Cycle (2015) was to be evaluated at the level of the school, within school self-evaluation (SSE) and improvement exercises, and this process monitored by the DES and its Inspectorate. The challenge herein was that SSE reports were brief documents, with no requirement from schools to specifically reflect on ICT integration in learning, and this individual reporting by schools made the task of reviewing the overall effectiveness of the framework from a national perspective undoable within the timeframe of this review process.

In terms of operational components, the comparative review of policies and programmes showed that infrastructure development, teacher training in ICT, content development and needs for pedagogical support were articulated within action plans, projects and/ or programmes focused on ICT integration across both jurisdictions. In his review of the literature on barriers to ICT usage in teaching in Saudi Arabia, Al Mulhim (2014) cited issues of lack of effective training and lack of time as impacting on ICT integration in practice by Saudi teachers. Albugami and Ahmed (2015a) noted that while there was interest in accessing ICT training among Saudi teachers who participated in their study, the training times were not always convenient, and teachers may need to be incentivised to undertake ICT training if outside of working hours. Alenezi (2016, online) pointed to delays in shifting from ICT adoption to ICT implementation as mandated by governmental policies, which he asserted was being caused by teachers’ becoming conflicted in transitioning from traditional offline methods of education to new ICT enabled learning environments, and lack of equipment in working order, where he asserted that ‘Saudi schools have had problems with making ICT tools available in working condition’. Albugami and Ahmed (2015a) further asserted that the constant breakdowns of computer equipment and the lack of technical assistance to repair equipment impacted on teachers’ confidence, and subsequent integration of ICT in their educational practice. Interestingly, the comparative review of policies showed that provision for ICT technical support was made explicit in the Saudi Tatweer project (2007–2023) and within the strategies, action plans and programmes reviewed from the Irish context. However, Al Mulhim’s (2014) literature review of the implementation of ICT in Saudi schools pointed to an ongoing issue of technical support, as well as issues with access to technology and the high cost of hardware and software, as an obstacle to ICT integration in education. Furthermore, Alkahtani’s (2017) study of the challenges in integrating ICT in education across four Saudi post-primary schools that participated in the Tatweer project (2007–2023), highlighted the challenge of teachers lacking working equipment and inadequate equipment maintenance, and further pointed to an issue in the long-term financial resourcing for ICT in education programmes – “The refusal of the [Tatweer] Project to continue paying for technical support, maintenance and repair of equipment was striking, because this was a necessary and critical component” (p.41). Similarly, the issue of resourcing for technical support exists within the Irish context, and has arguably prevailed since the “Schools IT 2000” policy (DES, Republic of Ireland 1997), during which time the “School ICT coordinators, introduced for the first time in 1999, also felt exploited, since they had to carry out all the technical work, as no funding was available for technicians” (Austin and Hunter 2013, p.188). Cosgrove et al. (2019) also noted in their evaluation of the Digital Learning Framework, the on-going issue of inadequate provision or implementation of technical support (particularly on-site technical support) and further suggested that schools might form clusters to make the allocation of technical support financially workable within the Irish context.

According to Geva-May et al. (2018, p.23) comparative reviews can provide valuable insights into how programmes operate but also have limitations in terms of the transferability of findings within a different jurisdiction as “…the fact that they are foreign introduces an element of speculation whether they can transfer”. The intention here was not to benchmark the progress in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against that in the Republic of Ireland, but rather to consider each national context independently and draw ‘learnings’ where possible rather than ‘lessons’ as asserted by Rose (1991), for either jurisdiction. Therefore, the notion of enabling transferability of findings from either context was discounted in favour of revealing ‘possibilities’ for the re-orientation of policies, strategies and programmes seeking to promote the integration of ICT in primary/ post-primary education settings.

In addition, it could further be argued that the absence of stakeholders’ perspectives on the enactment of these policies, strategies and programmes within the two countries was a limitation of this study. However, it simply wasn’t possible to include stakeholder voices as the protocols and procedures in relation to accessing stakeholders in governmental and school settings in one of the jurisdictions, namely the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, were multi-layered and complex in terms of seeking approvals and gaining consent, and thus were too protracted to bring to completion within the timeframe of the study. The study nevertheless provides a thorough critique of the framings of policies and programmes across both jurisdictions through the use of Kozma’s (2008) framework for comparative analysis of ICT policy in education, and from the integration of perspectives gleaned from limited academic literature reporting on ICT policy implementation in these national contexts.

This comparative review has shown that the policies, strategies and programmes for integrating ICT in primary and post-primary settings in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Republic of Ireland have overlapping underpinning rationales in terms of economic growth and educational reform, as well as social development (although to a lesser extent in KSA). The framing of these policies, strategies and programmes have involved consultations (and in some cases partnerships) with a wide range of stakeholders at governmental levels, school level, industry and connected communities, but would benefit from extending the consultation and indeed strengthening partnerships throughout the life-cycle of ICT integration in education, thus, involving all stakeholders at the levels of planning, implementation and evaluation of policies, strategies and programmes to enhance ICT integration in primary and post-primary settings. The possibilities for improvements in both jurisdictions include providing adequate financial and human resourcing to fully operationalize the teacher training and supports necessary for effective integration by teachers of ICT in primary and post-primary settings. Furthermore, the evaluation strategies and performance indicators in both countries need to be re-visited to ensure that evidence of their enactment is publicly available, and so that the resultant evaluation reports are detailed at a level that make visible the national progress with respect to the meaningful integration of technology in schools, and the corresponding impact on not only learners’ ICT skills but the broader suite of learner competencies contributing to their personal and social development.