In 2013, amid enthusiastic applause from the UK government, several prominent FE providers in the UK were unveiled as having won contracts to deliver the Colleges of Excellence programme in Saudi Arabia.

The likes of Pearson TQ and the Hertvec consortium (consisting of Hertford Regional and North Hertfordshire colleges, as well as the University of Hertfordshire) were joining an effort to deliver UK vocational education expertise to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Providers, including organisations from Canada and Germany, were assured that young Saudi learners would literally be knocking at the door. I was one of the lucky people who got a job through the programme.

Barely a year into the initiative, the reality began to strike home. Rather than hearing the voices of engaged and excited learners, I would often hear only the hollow sound of my own footsteps echoing through empty corridors, with barely a student to be found in the entire college.

So how did it all go so horribly wrong? In the first instance, the challenges that many Colleges of Excellence providers faced can be attributed to what the business world would consider to be a lack of due diligence, and a fundamental failure to do their homework.

Simply put, the majority of the providers lacked an understanding of the culture and attitudes towards work and education that exist within Saudi Arabia, including how those attitudes might eventually impact on the colleges’ success or failure.

The driving force for introducing technical and vocational education (TVET) to Saudi Arabia was “Saudisation” of the workforce: a government-led effort to decrease reliance on the expats who currently make up about 30 per cent of the Saudi population.

Evolution, not revolution

Within Saudi Arabia, the national mindset can best be exemplified by a cultural and social hierarchy that sees any Saudi placed higher in the social order than everyone else, simply by virtue of being Saudi. This mentality has proven to be at odds with both Saudisation and a TVET programme reliant on the development of skills that are traditionally carried out by imported labour.

By attempting to train learners in roles such as “vehicle maintenance” or “IT technician”, colleges are offering vocations that are not only unattractive to young Saudis but also contradict a mindset that views such roles as the remit of hired help.

As such, introducing TVET to Saudi Arabia and meeting the demands of Saudisation will require not so much a revolution within the kingdom’s education system but an evolution of ingrained attitudes towards education and employment, and how Saudis view themselves within their society.

The next challenge that providers would face was a western TVET model that, to put it simply, didn’t meet Saudi requirements.

In Saudi Arabia, tertiary education is, at best, a sink or swim experience. While capable learners can progress directly to university, those who don’t achieve in school move into work or - in a country that is effectively one large welfare state - unemployment.

Providers had to deliver a TVET model that, to meet Saudi standards, would demand a high level of academic ability from non-academic, vocationally orientated learners.

Take a vocationally minded learner at level 1 or 2, and expect that learner to participate in a year-long programme of classroom-based, foreign language study for seven hours a day. Then, if the learner achieves the required standard of written and spoken foreign language competence (many, unsurprisingly, do not), they can progress on to a two-year technical vocational programme where they learn, for example, electrical engineering or ICT, entirely in a foreign language.

While Colleges of Excellence and Saudi Skills Standards - the body set up to develop the qualifications to be delivered - would argue that the employers they consulted with were all demanding high levels of English language ability, this was often in contradiction to the requirements of the jobs that the same employers envisioned for the learners. In a case of square peg, round hole, once again it’s the student who suffers at the hands of an ill-conceived, off-the-shelf programme that seemingly ignores the learner as the critical component.

For my college, success - derived from positive senior leadership and culminating in being awarded a “good” by UK Ofsted inspectors - came too late. As the company withdrew from the programme, it became the first of several international providers to cite an inability to meet the demands of a contract that offered payment based on learner attendance at the same time as insisting on capital investment irrespective of learner numbers.

Ultimately, however, it is the learners who are the victims. An inability to place the learner at the heart of the programme has resulted in willing and enthusiastic young Saudis giving education a second go, only to find themselves battling against a system that sets them up to fail once again.

Russell Sheath has worked as a senior manager in colleges in Saudi Arabia