The recent achievements in the education sector deserve our careful attention. Something different is happening in this sector something worth observing and measuring objectively: the speed of implementation.
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Frankly, we are not accustomed to this pace in carrying out educational projects, particularly when it comes to building, equipping and opening schools within short periods of time.
Completing 86 new schools in less than a year, including 14 schools under the Social Responsibility Project, is not a figure that should pass as a routine government news item. It is an indicator worth examining.
Behind every new school are less crowded classrooms, students who may no longer have to attend school in shifts, and families who may find a school closer to where they live.
The school transportation project in the southern governorates and the southern Badia is likewise benefiting nearly 9,000 students and around 900 teachers.
School transportation may appear to be a simple service issue when viewed from Amman, but it becomes a genuine educational concern when it involves a remote village or a small population center, where the distance between home and school can exhaust students, increase the cost of education for their families, or disrupt their regular attendance.
The decision to allocate an additional JD10 million to the Student Support Fund from revenues generated by the sale of distinctive vehicle license plate numbers will enable around 10,000 additional students to benefit.
The increase in the fund's allocations in recent years should also be viewed from a social perspective. Rising living costs are making access to university increasingly difficult for low- and middle-income families.
When a high-achieving student can continue their education because the state has provided a scholarship or loan, we preserve a fundamental principle of the modern state: a family's financial means should not become the decisive factor determining the future of its children.
But the picture is larger than schools, transportation and university grants. The expansion of vocational and technical education through BTEC represents an attempt to address a longstanding imbalance in our education system, which has pushed large numbers of students toward academic tracks and university regardless of the needs of the economy and labor market or students' interests and abilities.
Restoring the status of vocational education is a change in the very philosophy of education transforming it from an education that ends with obtaining a certificate into one that is expected to culminate in knowledge, skills, and the ability to work and produce.
When we bring all these projects and decisions together, a picture emerges that deserves reflection: new schools, school transportation, university support, vocational education, teacher training, expansion of inclusive education and kindergartens, development of digital infrastructure, and institutional restructuring of the education sector.
These are not all projects of the same nature, but they are moving in one direction: building a healthy and equitable education system.
For many years, we have been accustomed to discussions about education being dominated by crises overcrowded classrooms, rented schools, Tawjihi results, curriculum changes, teacher shortages, weaknesses in some educational outcomes, and unemployment among graduates.
In many cases, policies moved to address problems only after they had emerged. Today, however, we are moving from managing education problems to building the system itself.
The government has demonstrated that accelerating implementation is possible when there is political will, funding and follow-up.
Perhaps the most important change we need in our relationship with government performance is to acknowledge achievements when they occur and build upon them by setting higher expectations especially because such achievements raise the bar for what we expect to become the standard for work and delivery across all sectors.
