Dubai: Dubai Sports Council and Dubai Police have announced the launch of a brand new initiative, ‘Studies and Sports’, which focuses on providing Dubai’s young sports talents with quality education at Dubai Police’s Hemaya Schools and, at the same time, increasing their training hours to meet international standards.
The initiative, which will start with the 2021-2022 sports and academic year in September, will adopt a flexible studies and sports system, to enable students to train at Hemaya Schools in the morning, in addition to evening training sessions at their clubs. This flexible academic system will lead to an 83 per cent increase in the annual training sessions — from 192 to 240 — for every student, while their annual training hours will increase by 96 per cent, from 352 hours to 472 hours.
The announcement was made on Tuesday following the official signing of an agreement between Dubai Sports Council and Dubai Police to launch the initiative.
Saeed Hareb, Secretary-General of Dubai Sports Council, and Major General Professor Dr Mohammad Ahmad Bin Fahd, Assistant Commander-in-Chief of Academic and Training Affairs at Dubai Police, signed the MoU in the presence officials from both sides.
Academy structure evaluation
The initiative comes following recommendations made by experts from French Football Federation following their visit to Dubai to evaluate the academy structure at Dubai clubs. The experts had emphasised on the need to increase training hours for trainees at the academies to meet international standards, and the Studies and Sports initiative is an effort by Dubai Sports Council to do just that without compromising on the academic needs of the young sports talents.
The initiative will gather the best young sports talents, aged 12 to 16, from Dubai’s clubs, starting with football in the first year, and the first batch of students are expected to start their studies with Hemaya Schools from the new academic year in September.
Hemaya Schools is an initiative of Dubai Police, launched in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA), with the aim of providing free quality education to the children of Dubai Police employees.
