Education in Bahrain

Accurate as of May 2013; unless indicated otherwise, the websites are all in English. Acknowledgement: Mais Alaranji.

The Kingdom of Bahrain is a small archipelago near the western shores of the Persian Gulf. The capital of this constitutional monarchy, Manama, is situated on the largest of the 33 islands, Bahrain Island, which is 55 km long by 18 km wide. Bahrain has a population of 1.324m (2011).

The Central Bank of Bahrain provides key economic indicators for the country as of 2012, together with certain education-related information such as the number of schools (269 in 2010/2011), the number of universities (22 in 2010/2011, of which 12 were private), and the number of students in schools (173,964 in 2010/2011). Further statistics on education in Bahrain were compiled by Childinfo, from 2007-2008 sources including UNICEF and UNESCO.

Turning to the educational system itself, the Ministry of Education has a number of pages in English that address pre-school, primary and secondary education, and religious and other forms of education in the country (for a summary, see the website of the Embassy of the Kingdom of Bahrain to the U.S.). To place this information in context, the Bahraini educational system was assessed in 2000 and 2001, and the reports can be found on the website of UNESCO (for the 4-page report in 2000, see here; for the 118-page report in 2001, see here).

Other sources of information on education in Bahrain include: Classbase; jobs.ac.uk; the website of the Bahraini General Trust for Higher Education Council (in Arabic); 4ICU, which ranks the Bahraini universities; and The Telegraph, which prepared in 2011 an expat guide to schools in Bahrain.

Finally, the presence of NGOs working in the field of education seems to be very limited in Bahrain, although there are some active global organizations such as the Oxford Business Group (OBG), which is a global publishing, research and consultancy firm, which is involved in education reforms in Bahrain and other Golf countries.