How the UAE is compressing a century of institutional learning

For much of modern educational history, the world’s most admired schools appeared to embody a simple truth: enduring quality took time.

The UK’s Eton College had nearly six centuries to become Eton, and Phillips Exeter Academy had more than two centuries to become Exeter; their reputations were built not in a single act of founding but through decisions made and remade over generations.

I came to think of tradition in those terms. Strip away the ceremony, and much of what we call institutional tradition is accumulated experience — a memory of what worked, what failed, and what was worth preserving.

After working across education systems in more than a dozen countries around the globe, I had accepted that there were few shortcuts. A school could open quickly. Buildings could be completed, teachers recruited, and students enrolled. But reputation was different. Excellence had to be earned slowly.

The UAE has made me less certain about that idea.

Age, by itself, does very little for an institution. What matters is whether experience improves judgment, and whether that judgment becomes part of the institution rather than disappearing when individuals leave — a collective memory, not an individual one. That raises a more interesting question: if experience is what matters, can a young institution acquire it faster? The UAE suggests that it can.

Dubai now has more than 230 private schools operating across 17 curricula, and in the 2023-24 inspection cycle, 81 per cent of students attended schools rated “Good” or better. The scale is notable, but the more consequential feature is the environment in which those schools operate.

Performance is visible. Parents have considerable choice and use it. University matriculation is published. Regulators regularly enter schools and make public judgments about what they find. School leaders arrive from education systems around the world, carrying with them lessons learned elsewhere. Together, these create a feedback architecture fast enough that the system notices what works before a slow cycle of trial and error ever would.

A new school therefore does not have to discover everything for itself. It can inherit experience before it has accumulated much of its own, so that weaknesses are identified while they are still correctable and good leadership compresses years of trial and error into a fraction of the time.

I have watched this happen through my work. The results are important, but what interests me more is how quickly the habits behind them became established. Expectations ceased to require explanation, teachers learned from previous cohorts, and decisions made in one year shaped those made in the next — until a school that was still young in chronological terms began to display some of the characteristics normally associated with much older institutions.

One young school producing unusually strong results might simply be an outlier, but seeing comparable habits take root in another young institution thousands of miles away suggests that something more transferable may be involved.

That possibility matters well beyond schools. Governments around the world are investing enormous sums in institutions they hope will endure — universities, research centres, hospitals and cultural organisations among them — while investors increasingly place long-term capital behind the physical and social infrastructure that supports them.

Yet we still tend to think about institutional maturity as though it were governed principally by the calendar.

History matters, of course. The character of Eton or Exeter cannot be reproduced by importing a name, constructing a campus or hiring an impressive founding team, and nor should anyone pretend otherwise. But history and learning are not the same thing. Much of what takes an institution decades to acquire is practical knowledge — when to intervene, what not to change, which standards cannot be compromised, and how to recognise trouble before it becomes institutionalised — and in older organisations that knowledge accumulated slowly simply because there was no other way for it to accumulate.

A younger institution operating today does not necessarily face the same constraint. It can borrow experience, observe institutions elsewhere, and subject itself to scrutiny earlier in its life, and most important, it can build the habit of remembering what it learns. That changes the significance of age.

Perhaps great institutions have traditionally taken generations not because there is anything indispensable about the passage of generations themselves, but because that was simply how long it took institutions to know enough — and the experiment taking place in the UAE suggests that some of that time can be compressed.

Nations competing to build universities, hospitals, companies and public institutions may discover that one of their greatest advantages has little to do with the amount of capital they can deploy. It is how quickly they learn, together.