The chairman of the National Democratic Party (NDP) Education Committee Hisam Badrawi said he was very concerned about the increasing roles being taken up by Egypt's National Authority for Quality Assurance and Accreditation of Education (NAQAAE). He said the Authority seemed to have assumed all the functions of the Ministry of Education. Speaking at a meeting of the Education Committee of the Shoura Council [Egypt's higher chamber of parliament] yesterday, he added that the Authority's tasks are to specify whether the minimum level of education quality set by the State is acceptable or not according to international criteria. Badrawi demanded the Authority's budget be reviewed in light of its functions. He said the main mistakes in the laws concerning the establishment of the NAQAAE is to consider it an economic authority, which means it is judged according to how many resources it brings to the State. He added that the Authority should rather have been a service authority, pointing out that its budget was not enough to define how much 40,000 schools and some 800 faculties were in line with to international quality criteria. Badrawi affirmed the government would sooner or later start its war against the Authority, especially after the latter announced that some public faculties and schools did not conform to quality standards. He also said the Authority should have been under the Presidency and not the government in order to guarantee its autonomy. Nagui Shehab deplored such criticism from the NDP Education Committee chairman. He affirmed that Badrawi must be the first person in charge of orienting Egypt's educational policy given the NDP majority in both chamber of Parliament, adding that the Authority does not have the tools to play this role. MP Mohamed Naguib demanded that a clear mechanism be adopted to guarantee education quality, provided that the society might interact with this mechanism. He also called for raising the budget of the Ministry of Education and the NAQAAE, pointing out that the only budget which has been raised in the US amid the financial crisis is the one for education development. NAQAAE Chairman Magdy Qasem said education in Egypt is not as bad as many people imagine, adding there are many Egyptian faculties standing on an equal footing with their foreign counterparts worldwide. Finally, he said many obstacles hamper the Authority's work, as it is sometimes compelled to hold its meetings on the street.
