DUBAI (The Thursday Times) — Private schools in Dubai must report any pupil who misses five consecutive days without explanation, or whose absences add up to 10% of a term, under a student protection policy from the emirate’s education regulator, the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA).
The rules form part of the KHDA’s Student Safety and Protection Policy framework, which ties attendance tracking to spotting children who may be at risk. Either threshold triggers a report, but staff who have any concern about a pupil’s safety must alert the school’s designated protection coordinator straight away, without waiting for a threshold to be reached, the authority said.
Schools must have written attendance policies suited to their pupils’ ages and modes of study, keep reliable records, and analyse patterns of frequent or unexplained absence to find cases that need intervention. They may set lower thresholds for pupils known to be at greater risk, and must watch for repeated short absences during the school day, such as frequent trips to the toilet or the school clinic, where these may point to a problem.
Parents first, with exceptions
For pupils under 18, schools must follow up absences with parents, guardians, or carers. Students aged 18 and over are contacted directly, and their families can be involved only with consent or where someone’s safety is at risk. The policy recognises that contacting a family may in some cases increase the danger to a child, and leaves that judgment to the school’s designated protection officer.
Every institution must also have a written, tested protocol for when a pupil cannot be found during the school day, with immediate response and escalation steps, and must record every attempt to reach a student and their family and every action taken to protect them. Schools have a 12-month phased implementation period.
Different rules for universities and boarders
Universities and vocational training institutes are not automatically bound by the five-day and 10% thresholds, and must set their own based on their terms, credit hours, and modes of study, including part-time, evening, and distance learning. Early childhood centres will measure absence against each child’s recorded attendance schedule rather than a single model for all children.
Schools with boarding facilities must appoint a protection officer and a deputy for residential areas from the start, and put out-of-hours supervision, visitor controls, and risk assessments fully in place within 12 months. Existing residential staff must complete specialised level-two training within three months.
The rules apply across Dubai’s private school sector, which educates most of the emirate’s children, many of them from expatriate families from South Asia.
