Saudi Gazette report

RIYADH - The Ministry of Education will implement mixed education initiative in government schools during the new academic year. As part of this, women will be allowed to teach fourth-grade boy and girl students in public elementary schools.

Okaz/Saudi Gazette has learnt from well-informed sources that the ministry has identified three schools under the Early Childhood School Project in the education department of Al-Qassim Region (Buraidah) and the education departments of Unaizah and Al-Bukayriyah governorates to implement this initiative during the current academic year, which will start Sunday, Aug. 20, with the return of male and female students to school.

The ministry had previously issued a decision to allow women to teach students in the entire elementary phase of private and international schools.

During August 2022, the ministry had instructed that women have to be assigned as teachers in the fourth grade of elementary schools in the private and foreign education sector in the Jeddah governorate, effective from the academic year of 1444.

The ministry clarified that this decision vis-a-vis grade four comes in tandem with the success achieved after application of assigning the teaching of students from the first to third grades of elementary level of the private and foreign girls' schools to female teachers.

It was noteworthy that the ministry announced in the beginning of the school academic year in September 2019 before the outbreak of coronavirus that women would be teaching boys up to the third grade of elementary public schools for the first time in the Kingdom.