Manama: Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development (QF) has held a "Counsellors' Workshop" designed to provide guidance to college-bound students.

The training session emphasised the importance of advising high school students early on about college and revealed how to meet the specific entry criteria for one of QF's universities.

"QF wants more applicants, and a good thing that QF is doing is that they are telling counsellors to not only counsel their students in the last year of high school, but to advise them in year ten also," Eisa Al Suwaidi, Chief Executive Officer of Ta'allum Training and Education Group and the main presenter of the training session, said. "I have discussed with QF their admission processes, and it's very important the counsellors know these requirements."

QF is now home to nine educational establishments that offer an array of educational programmes.

It is therefore important that counsellors understand the requirements their students must meet to earn admission to one of its universities, QF said in a statement.

"Qatar Foundation is trying to teach counsellors more about the requirements for admission to Education City. And because of this, even in the last four years the number of students that have applied to QF have been higher," Khalifa A Salahi, Recruitment and Outreach Coordinator at QF, said. "If students know early on what they are interested in, they will know what university at QF they should apply to," he said.

The workshop also encouraged teachers to study and interpret students' standardised test results, in order to assess their relative strengths in mathematics, English and science, the statement said.