in an environment that is completely separate to the training and work environment of the (female) teachers of girls.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the education system in Saudi Arabia; section 3 discusses the data and methodology; section 4 presents the results from the models; and section 5 includes a discussion of the main findings and their policy implications.

# 2. Education System in Saudi Arabia

Preuniversity education in Saudi Arabia is divided into four levels: preprimary, elementary, intermediate, and secondary education. Preprimary education includes three years starting at age 3; elementary education starts normally at age 6 and includes grades 1 through 6; intermediate education comprises grades 7 to 9; and secondary education consists of grades 10 through 12. Students in Saudi Arabia attend single-gender schools, except in preprimary. Boys and girls are separated from grade 1 and taught by teachers of the same gender. A recent reform, though still on a limited scale, has allowed boys in grades 1 through 3 to enroll in girls’ elementary schools, and, as a result, boys are taught by female teachers but in separate classes.

Saudi Arabia’s K–12 education system includes more than 5.5 million students and more than 450,000 teachers and is administered through 47 education directorates and 383 education offices within directorates. The Saudi Ministry of Education (MOE) plays a central role in setting the policies and regulations for schools across the country including curriculum, teacher hiring and promotion, and student assessment. Directorates and offices are responsible for implementing the directives of the MOE and tend to have a similar structure across the country (OECD 2020).

Over the last few decades, Saudi Arabia has achieved substantial progress in improving access to education. For example, the gross enrollment ratio (GER) in primary education increased from 58 percent in 1979 to 101 percent in 2019. During the same period, the GER in secondary education increased from 27 percent to 112 percent. Although increased access to education is a positive development, these large gains in access have not been accompanied by similar improvements in students’ learning outcomes.

Overall, learning outcomes remain below expectations in Saudi Arabia. Data from TIMSS 2019 show that, in mathematics, Saudi Arabia ranks 53rd of 58 countries (i.e., below 52 countries) in grade 4 and 37th of 39 (outperformed by 36 countries) in grade 8. In PISA 2018, less than half (48 percent) of 15year-old students in Saudi Arabia achieved minimum proficiency in reading and almost no student was a top performer (i.e., achieving levels 5 or 6; OECD 2019). Additionally, only 27 percent of Saudi students in the same age group achieved at least minimum proficiency in mathematics, compared to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average of 75 percent. In particular, learning outcomes in Saudi Arabia are low relative to the country’s level of wealth, and studies (Patrinos and Angrist 2019) have identified Saudi Arabia as an outlier when examining Harmonized Learning Outcomes<sup>4</sup> relative to gross domestic product (GDP) worldwide. Although, as noted above, significant gender differences in achievement can be found in other countries — sometimes in favor of boys, and sometimes in favor of girls (Mullis et al. 2017; 2020) — the gender differences observed in Saudi Arabia are consistently among the largest in the world, with girls showing a consistent advantage, across grade levels and subject areas.

> 4 A composite indicator of learning outcomes at the country level, based on data from large-scale assessments such as TIMSS, PISA, Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), and early-grade reading or mathematics assessments (Angrist et al. 2021).

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