Blog / A Humanising Education System
A Humanising Education System

The Landscape of Manifestations of Ecosystemic Transformation: Towards a Shared Understanding of an Education System that Learns to Facilitate its Own Transformation

8 min read

Karima Kadaoui, Tamkeen facilitator and researcher at the Tamkeen For Our Humanity Foundation

Riada is often seen as a strategic reform programme, focused on improving learning, developing teaching practices, enhancing school effectiveness, and putting in place support mechanisms, facilities and certification schemes. This understanding is correct. However, the practical experience of its roll-out also reveals a broader and deeper reality: Riada is also a movement through which the education system is learning to transform itself.

Beyond its programmatic dimension, Riada can be seen as a landscape of manifestations of transformation. This landscape is evident in the emergence of new teaching practices, new relational networks, new forms of support, new modes of cooperation, new governance structures, and new conditions for the progress of pupils, schools and educational ecosystems. These manifestations are not merely isolated outcomes. They reflect a system that is gradually becoming better able to observe and reflect upon itself in new ways, to support itself in new ways, and to organise itself differently in the service of learning, educational continuity and engagement, support for teaching staff, consistency across schools, and co-fourishing.

From this perspective, Riada Tahawul calls for a broader perspective. It is no longer just a matter of seeing what is being implemented, but also of recognizing what the system is learning through this implementation. It involves moving beyond the logic of mere implementation to a broader understanding of systemic transformation: how a system gradually develops the capacity to recognize, appreciate, evaluate, support, connect, reflect, learn, and continuously improve its own process of change.

This interpretation in no way diminishes the importance of measurable results. On the contrary, it gives them broader significance. The progress observed in basic learning, the structuring of teaching approaches, the improvement of school environments, the accreditation of schools, and the strengthening of support practices are all important manifestations. But they can also be interpreted as signs of a deeper process: the gradual emergence of an educational ecosystem that is more self-aware, more interconnected, more coherent, and better able to facilitate its own transformation.

From this perspective, Riada Tahawul can be understood through a living grammar of transformation. This grammar is not limited to technical mechanisms. It consists of relational and structuring forms through which the system learns to guide its own evolution. Among these forms, three stand out today as particularly fruitful.

The first is facilitation. Through the national institutionalization of the dispositif de facilitation (Facilitation Mechanism) / Aliat Al Mowakaba, the system strengthens its capacity to support educational stakeholders, to facilitate the emergence of school environments conducive to learning and flourishing, to support professional dialogues rooted in growing trust, to ground learning in real-world contexts, to encourage the continuous adjustment of practices, and to make support a prerequisite for progress rather than merely a tool for control. Facilitation here is not an external add-on. It is a way for the system to align itself with its humanized and humanizing essence, to learn alongside its own stakeholders, as closely as possible to the transformations it seeks to enable.

The second model is the Integrated School pool/ Hawd Madrasi Moundamij. This dynamic broadens the scope of transformation by shifting the focus from the school in isolation to a regional ecosystem of learning. By connecting schools within the same territory, which serve the same children and families, from preschool through high school, it opens up new possibilities for continuity, resource sharing, coherence, cooperation, and amplification. Schools are no longer viewed solely as autonomous administrative or pedagogical units, but as components of a broader educational environment capable of co-creating shared conditions for success and co-flourishing. Thus, the desired autonomy of schools is facilitated by their effective integration into their natural ecosystem.

The third form consists of systemic moments for co-reflection and the growing of a shared understanding: national, regional, and provincial consultations; strategic retreats; regional forums; local recognition and appreciation workshops; feedback workshops; and multi-level steering meetings. These spaces are not peripheral to the transformation. They constitute an essential dimension of it. They enable the education system to develop a more nuanced self-awareness by giving actors at various levels the opportunity to reflect together based on lived experience, to recognize what is emerging, to more accurately identify tensions and progress, and to foster a shared understanding of the conditions for transformation and its grammar.

Taken together, these three forms reveal Riada Tahawul not merely as Islah to be implemented, but as a collective process of systemic learning. They make transformation not only possible, but also perceptible, intelligible, shareable, and gradually habitable.

This is particularly important because transformation is not reflected solely in visible indicators. It is also reflected in the profound shifts taking place in educational life: in the evolution of the teacher-learner relationship, in school leadership’s support for pedagogical change, in cooperation among actors across traditional boundaries, in the pooling of resources, in the emphasis on educational continuity, and in the system’s growing ability to recognize the school not only as a place of instruction but as a living ecosystem of learning.

Such a process is not without tension. It places intense demands on teachers, principals, inspectors, administrators, and education leaders. It requires efforts to adapt, take ownership, understand, coordinate, and sometimes redefine professional roles. Recognizing this burden is an integral part of developing systemic awareness. This serves as a reminder that sustainable transformation cannot be reduced to mere compliance or mere execution. It must be supported, facilitated, understood, acknowledged, and made resilient and sustainable over time. This is why facilitating systemic awareness and fostering a shared understanding are not secondary considerations. They are among the very conditions that make it possible to move beyond Islah to Tahawul.

The stakes involved in this shared understanding are significant. A system does not transform simply by implementing measures. It also transforms by learning to see itself, to communicate with one another, to understand one another, and to recognize the conditions under which transformations can take shape, take root, and gain momentum. In this sense, systemic awareness is itself a strategic capability. It strengthens coherence across levels of governance, nurtures not only collective intelligence but also collective wisdom, and lends greater meaning, continuity, and resilience to the transformation process.

Riada Tahawul can thus be understood as the dynamic link between a strategic reform agenda and an emerging process of self-transformation within the education system. What is taking shape here is not merely an improvement in academic performance. It is also the possibility of an education system that learns to facilitate its own transformation, in the service of the flourishing of every learner, every school, and every educational community.

The challenge before us, therefore, is not merely to continue with implementation. It is also to continue fostering the conditions that allow this transformation to grow in meaning and substance, in coherence and sustainability. This involves strengthening facilitation dynamics, supporting educational actors, expanding spaces for co-reflection, deepening shared understanding, and recognizing the living ecologies and relational networks through which transformation becomes a reality.

From this perspective, Riada Tahawul is not merely Islah (and, incidentally, the word “reform” does not do justice to Islah, which, in its lexical sense, means “reconciliation”). It is the dynamic, cyclical movement through which an educational system learns to become more self-aware, more capable of guiding itself, and better able to create the conditions for a meaningful, sustainable, and deeply humanized and humanizing transformation.

Teachers are adjusting their practices. Educational inspectors are providing feedback. Provincial education authorities are learning to facilitate the emergence of new relational dynamics and are supporting the development of new frameworks and tools for monitoring and evaluation. Content, pedagogical approaches, and governance are evolving in real time, nurtured by lived experience. The system is learning to self-facilitate its transformation.

This movement is real, profound, and unprecedented. But it often remains invisible to those who are part of it, because no one has told them that they are co-creators of a pioneering transformation (Riada Tahawul). They experience Riada as a program to be implemented that may have a politically defined timeline, often as an additional requirement, rather than as a historic contribution.

The polemic surrounding Riada is fueled precisely by this discrepancy in language: institutional discourse speaks of successful reform and widespread implementation, while the lived experiences speak of overload, “chaos,” and constant adjustments. Both are true. But without a common language, the actual transformation becomes politically vulnerable.

This perceived “chaos” is in reality a sign of a living transformation, nonlinear by nature, not because it fails, but because it is neither a top-down nor a bottom-up implementation, but rather an iterative, multiscale, co-emergent process; in which each level of the system transforms and is transformed by the others, giving rise to a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

The expectation of a vertical and orderly rollout is precisely what makes Riada incomprehensible to those involved in it. Our perspective must broaden: with a language that extends the Riada programs to a Riada of transformation.

In the context of an election cycle, this vulnerability can be exploited, not because Riada is failing, but because its true nature has not yet been articulated and is therefore not yet fully realized. Riada is a pioneering transformation that has yet to recognize itself. Providing it with this mirror, through language, spaces for recognition, and a coherent narrative, is today the most powerful and protective strategic act, both politically and pedagogically.

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