My old sparring partner Squarepeg is quite right, of course. A lot of schools in Doha have little or no provision for SEN children and there is not much in the way of EAL support either. Trying to get the students through a curriculum that is in their second language is no easy task, so of course many schools would prefer to have more students for whom English is their "mother tongue".
If a school has a significant proportion of Qatari students, then of course the Supreme and Absolutely Perfect Education Council of Qatar will want to make sure that the little darlings are getting lots and lots of lessons in Arabic and Islamic Studies. (That's a fat lot of use if your family are not Muslims and and you speak English as your first language.) Learning Arabic may sound like a fun thing for your child to do, but it isn't because the Arabic teachers follow the Supreme and Immaculate Education Council's orders and therefore they teach it in a really dull and useless way, instead of concentrating on conversational Arabic that could be useful and enjoyable. As for Islamic Studies, the teachers (who are usually Egyptians or Lebanese) do not want to lose their jobs and so they let the students see the exam papers before the actual exams, so that they can memorise all of the answers. Then the students get amazingly high marks and everyone is happy.
My old sparring partner Squarepeg is quite right, of course. A lot of schools in Doha have little or no provision for SEN children and there is not much in the way of EAL support either. Trying to get the students through a curriculum that is in their second language is no easy task, so of course many schools would prefer to have more students for whom English is their "mother tongue".
If a school has a significant proportion of Qatari students, then of course the Supreme and Absolutely Perfect Education Council of Qatar will want to make sure that the little darlings are getting lots and lots of lessons in Arabic and Islamic Studies. (That's a fat lot of use if your family are not Muslims and and you speak English as your first language.) Learning Arabic may sound like a fun thing for your child to do, but it isn't because the Arabic teachers follow the Supreme and Immaculate Education Council's orders and therefore they teach it in a really dull and useless way, instead of concentrating on conversational Arabic that could be useful and enjoyable. As for Islamic Studies, the teachers (who are usually Egyptians or Lebanese) do not want to lose their jobs and so they let the students see the exam papers before the actual exams, so that they can memorise all of the answers. Then the students get amazingly high marks and everyone is happy.