Etihad Airways is preparing to introduce a new generation of aircraft cabins as the Abu Dhabi-based carrier expands its fleet and increases its focus on premium travel.

The airline has unveiled its new “Beyond Borders” product and experience, using its forthcoming Airbus A330 cabin as the main showcase for the changes. The new cabin will feature separate First, Business and Economy products, with elements of the design expected to appear across other parts of Etihad’s fleet and premium facilities.

The airline presented the new A330 cabin at Arabian Travel Market, alongside plans to extend elements of the new design to its Airbus A321LR fleet.

The changes come as Etihad pursues a broader expansion programme that includes a reported $20bn investment in aircraft and customer experience, as well as a $1bn programme to retrofit existing aircraft.

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New A330 cabin to enter service in 2027

Etihad said its new Airbus A330 will enter service from September 2027, with 15 aircraft expected to join the fleet over five years.

The aircraft will be used on regional and medium-haul routes, particularly markets across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Etihad said the three-cabin configuration is intended to provide additional capacity while maintaining a premium offering on routes where demand for higher-end travel is growing.

The A330 will include four First suites at the front of the aircraft. Each suite will have a closing door, providing passengers with additional privacy, as well as space for a companion to dine or spend time during the flight.

The suites will also feature 32-inch screens, wireless charging, dedicated storage and personal compartments. Etihad said each First suite will have a personal powder station equipped with amenities.

The airline’s decision to include First Class on the A330 is part of a wider effort to increase the availability of its highest cabin class beyond its flagship long-haul aircraft.

Antonoaldo Neves, chief executive of Etihad Airways, said the airline was seeking to extend the concept across more of its network.

“Beyond Borders is becoming visible in the moments that matter most to our guests. It is showcased in the aircraft they fly, the cabins they enjoy, the lounges they explore and the service that connects every part of the journey,” Neves said.

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Business Class adds privacy

The new A330 Business cabin will contain 24 fully lie-flat seats. All seats will face forward and provide direct aisle access, while sliding doors will give passengers additional privacy.

Each Business seat will have a 17.3-inch screen, wireless and wired charging, a large table and dedicated storage.

The configuration reflects the airline’s efforts to provide lie-flat seating and direct aisle access on a wider range of aircraft and routes.

That strategy was previously demonstrated by the A321LR, a narrowbody aircraft that Etihad equipped with First suites and fully lie-flat Business seats.

Neves said the A321LR had challenged conventional expectations about what could be offered on a single-aisle aircraft.

“The A321LR showed what is possible when we challenge the expected model of narrowbody flying. We brought First and fully lie-flat Business to a single-aisle aircraft and guests have responded strongly to the experience it offers, actively choosing to fly on the aircraft,” he said.

Etihad said the A321LR has already been operating with the new premium configuration and that passengers have shown a preference for services operated by the aircraft.

The airline now plans to extend elements of the Beyond Borders design language to the A321LR, including across its First, Business and Economy cabins.

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Economy cabin gets 4K screens

The new A330 Economy cabin will have 252 seats, with the airline describing the design as a brighter and calmer environment.

Seats will include Etihad’s fixed-wing headrest, 13.3-inch 4K touchscreen entertainment displays and personal charging facilities.

A dedicated Extra Legroom section will provide 32 seats with four inches of additional pitch.

The cabin changes are part of a broader attempt by Etihad to establish a more consistent look across different aircraft types while retaining different seating configurations according to the aircraft and route.

Neves said the airline’s plans extend beyond the aircraft itself.

“Beyond Borders goes beyond the aircraft and the seat. It is about the entire journey – our cabins, lounges, food, wellbeing, connectivity and the way we look after our guests,” he said.

First Class expansion becomes a priority

First Class is emerging as a central part of Etihad’s fleet strategy.

The airline said it plans to add First Class to more aircraft and routes through a combination of new aircraft deliveries and retrofit programmes.

The A321LR has already established a First Class offering on a single-aisle aircraft, while the new A330 will introduce First to a wider portion of Etihad’s regional and medium-haul widebody network.

The carrier’s flagship First Apartments and The Residence will remain associated with its Airbus A380 fleet. A mock-up of The Residence is being displayed at Arabian Travel Market.

The expansion means Etihad’s First Class proposition will increasingly span different aircraft types, rather than being concentrated exclusively on its largest long-haul aircraft.

Neves said the airline planned to increase the number of First seats across its fleet in the coming years.

“We are also doubling down on First, bringing an exceptional First experience to our new A330 and increasing the number of First seats across our fleet over the coming years,” he said.

Design takes cues from Abu Dhabi

Etihad’s new cabin design is also intended to create a common visual identity across its aircraft and premium facilities.

The design concept draws on Abu Dhabi’s landscape, architecture and development, with the airline describing the approach as moving “from sand to superstructure.”

The cabins use bright interiors and subdued tones, combined with details intended to reference Etihad’s existing visual identity.

Among the design features are lighting inspired by the airline’s facet pattern and leather seating with precision perforation in premium cabins. First Class seat numbers are projected discreetly onto the floor.

Etihad also plans to introduce common design elements across aircraft and lounges.

The objective is to create a more consistent experience between the airport, lounge and aircraft, rather than treating each part of the journey as a separate product.

Fleet investment underpins expansion

The new A330 cabins form part of a much larger fleet and customer-experience investment programme at Etihad.

The airline said it is investing $20bn in new aircraft and customer experience as it continues to expand, alongside a $1 billion fleet retrofit programme.

The A330 deliveries are expected to give Etihad additional flexibility on regional and medium-haul routes, while the continued rollout of new cabin designs will gradually change the experience across its existing and incoming fleet.

The scale of the programme comes as Etihad enters a period of significant fleet growth and seeks to increase its presence across international markets from its Abu Dhabi hub.

For passengers, the most visible changes will be the new cabin configurations, increased availability of First Class and the introduction of a more unified design across aircraft and airport facilities.

“Now we are taking the next step. At ATM, our new A330 brings Beyond Borders to life with an all-new cabin experience, while we are extending the Beyond Borders look and feel to our A321LR as we create greater consistency across the Etihad journey,” Neves said.

Etihad said additional products and elements of the new experience will be revealed in the coming months as the airline continues its fleet expansion and retrofit programme.

Miral will invest more than Dhs12bn in Yas Island over the next five years as it expands the destination’s attractions, hospitality offering and leisure experiences to support Abu Dhabi’s Tourism Strategy 2030.

The investment will fund a pipeline of new developments alongside upgrades and expansions to existing attractions, reinforcing Yas Island’s position as one of the region’s leading leisure and entertainment destinations.

Miral said the next phase of development will focus on expanding its existing theme parks and attractions while introducing new immersive rides and experiences designed to meet evolving visitor expectations. The programme will also increase the island’s hotel capacity with the addition of new rooms and enhancements to its hospitality portfolio, WAM reported.

Mohamed Khalifa Al Mubarak, chairman of Miral, said: “This investment reflects our commitment to Abu Dhabi’s long-term vision and our ambition to continue shaping one of the world’s most dynamic tourism destinations. Yas Island has become a global success story, demonstrating how world-class experiences contribute to economic growth, enhance quality of life and strengthen Abu Dhabi’s appeal to audiences from around the world.”

He added that the investment will build on Yas Island’s momentum by introducing new attractions while expanding its hospitality and leisure offerings to meet growing visitor demand.

Miral clarified that the Dhs12bn investment is separate from the previously announced Disney theme park project and represents an independent programme aimed at driving the long-term growth of Yas Island.

The company said the developments are expected to enrich the visitor experience while supporting job creation, skills development and the continued growth of Abu Dhabi’s tourism sector as part of the emirate’s broader economic diversification strategy.

At the recently concluded LEAP 2026, Saudi Arabia’s AI story shifted from announcements to hardware on the ground. The first phase of HUMAIN’s build-out is now underway on NVIDIA’s Blackwell Ultra infrastructure, the opening move in a plan to develop AI factories with up to 500 megawatts of capacity and several hundred thousand GPUs over five years.

Marc Domenech, NVIDIA‘s VP for Enterprise across the Middle East, Türkiye, Africa and Southern Europe, talks to Gulf Business about what’s now operational in the kingdom, why energy efficiency, not just raw power, will decide who wins, and how the Saudi and UAE ecosystems will evolve as the region moves from building AI models to running them at scale.

LEAP 2026 marked a shift from AI investment announcements towards actual deployed capacity in Saudi Arabia. What is now operational, and how quickly do you expect utilisation and demand for AI compute to grow from here?

LEAP demonstrated that Saudi Arabia is moving decisively from ambition to execution. The first phase of HUMAIN’s build-out is now underway, centred around NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra infrastructure designed to support advanced model development and large-scale inference in the kingdom.

This is the beginning of a much broader roadmap. NVIDIA and HUMAIN announced plans to develop AI factories with capacity of up to 500 megawatts over five years, supported by several hundred thousand NVIDIA GPUs. That capacity will scale progressively as facilities, energy, networking, software and customer requirements develop together.

The next measure of progress is utilisation. Training advanced models requires substantial computing power, but inference, using those models to serve people and businesses, creates continuous demand. As organisations move beyond pilots and deploy AI agents and applications across their operations, that demand will become broader and more sustained.

Saudi Arabia has the investment, energy resources, talent ambitions and industrial base to move quickly. Success will ultimately be measured not by installed capacity alone, but by what that capacity produces: locally relevant models, new applications, scientific advances, more productive industries and globally competitive companies.

The NVIDIA–HUMAIN collaboration envisages AI factories with up to 500 megawatts of capacity and several hundred thousand NVIDIA GPUs over five years. What will infrastructure at that scale enable Saudi Arabia to do?

It will give Saudi Arabia the computing foundation to develop and deploy AI at national and industrial scale.

An AI factory is different from a traditional data centre. A conventional data centre stores information and runs applications; an AI factory turns data into intelligence. It brings together accelerated computing, high-performance networking and software to train models, adapt them using local knowledge and operate them at scale.

This level of capacity can support Arabic-language models, AI agents, scientific research, industrial digital twins, robotics, autonomous systems, and more. It can also enable organisations to work with complex datasets and develop applications tailored to the kingdom’s priorities.

Shared infrastructure can lower the barrier to innovation. A startup, university or business should not need to build its own supercomputer before it can use advanced AI. Access through cloud services can give a much wider ecosystem the computing and software required to build, test and scale new ideas.

The hardware itself is not the outcome. Its value will be determined by what grows around it: developers creating products, startups building companies, researchers advancing science and established industries becoming more productive. That is how computing capacity translates into durable economic value.

As Saudi Arabia builds local AI infrastructure, how important is it that the kingdom develops its own models, data capabilities and technical expertise rather than simply importing computing power and technology?

It is critical. Computing capacity provides the foundation, but lasting value comes from combining it with local data, models, software, talent and industry expertise.

Every country has its own language, culture, institutions and economic priorities. Saudi Arabia therefore has a clear opportunity to develop AI that reflects its context, from Arabic-language models to applications designed for sectors such as energy, healthcare, financial services, logistics and manufacturing.

This does not mean developing every layer of the technology independently. AI advances through global research, common technology platforms, open models and international collaboration. The opportunity is to use that global foundation to build capabilities that are locally relevant, locally operated and aligned with the kingdom’s priorities.

Talent is what connects infrastructure to outcomes. Developers need the skills to build and optimise models. Enterprises need people who can deploy AI securely and reliably in production. Researchers and startups need access to computing and software so they can turn ideas into working applications.

The countries that derive the greatest value from AI will not necessarily be those that own every element of the technology stack. They will be those that can turn their knowledge, data and expertise into intelligence that improves services, strengthens industries and creates new opportunities.

Power, cooling and access to energy are becoming major constraints on AI data-centre expansion globally. Could energy availability eventually become a bigger bottleneck than access to GPUs?

Energy will be a defining consideration for AI infrastructure everywhere. The central question, however, is not simply how much power is available, but how efficiently that power can be converted into useful intelligence.

That requires treating the AI factory as one integrated system. Computing, networking, cooling, software and the facility itself must be designed together. Accelerated computing is fundamental because it performs AI and high-performance computing workloads far more efficiently than general-purpose architectures.

Rack-scale design, high-speed networking and direct liquid cooling can improve performance and computing density. Software is equally important: optimised models and inference engines can reduce the resources needed to produce each result.

The Gulf has an opportunity to design new facilities around these requirements from the outset, rather than adapting data centres built for an earlier generation of computing. The region also brings extensive experience in developing and operating large, complex energy systems.

Energy availability will remain an important part of every infrastructure decision. The industry’s responsibility is to keep improving efficiency across chips, systems, networking, cooling and software. The objective is to produce more intelligence—and greater economic value—from every watt.

NVIDIA is also working on skills development, robotics, physical AI and digital twins in Saudi Arabia. Where do you expect the first meaningful commercial applications outside the technology sector?

The earliest applications are likely to emerge in sectors where Saudi Arabia already has deep expertise, substantial physical assets and clearly defined operational challenges.

Energy and manufacturing are strong examples. Companies can use digital twins to simulate facilities, production lines and industrial processes before making changes in the physical world. This can improve design, maintenance, worker safety and operational efficiency.

In logistics, AI can optimise warehouses, ports and distribution networks, while autonomous systems and robotics can support repetitive, complex or physically demanding work. Construction and infrastructure operators can simulate projects, test different scenarios and identify potential problems earlier.

Healthcare and life sciences also present significant opportunities, including medical imaging, genomics, drug discovery and AI assistants that help researchers and healthcare professionals work with complex information. These applications must be developed with the appropriate safeguards and specialist expertise.

Physical AI takes this further by enabling machines to perceive, reason and act in the real world. Training and testing those systems in physically accurate simulations before deployment can shorten development cycles while reducing cost and risk.

Adoption will move fastest where AI addresses a measurable need. The strongest projects will begin with the desired outcome: higher productivity, greater safety or better service, and apply the right technology to achieve it.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are both making ambitious investments in AI. How do you see their respective ecosystems evolving, and where will the strongest demand for NVIDIA technology emerge across the GCC over the next three to five years?

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are each building on different economic strengths and institutional capabilities. We do not view their progress as a race with a single winner. Growth in either market can strengthen the wider region by attracting talent, investment and companies to the GCC.

Saudi Arabia has an opportunity to apply AI across industries operating at significant scale, including energy, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and major infrastructure projects. Its investments in computing capacity and skills can support economic diversification and the development of locally relevant services.

The UAE has established itself as an international business and technology hub, supported by strong research institutions, cloud providers, technology companies and global connectivity. Its ecosystem is advancing across infrastructure, research, enterprise adoption and digital services.

Over the next three to five years, demand across both markets will increasingly shift from building models to running them. AI agents will transform knowledge work, digital twins and robotics will reshape physical industries, and Arabic-language applications will serve people and organisations throughout the region. This growth in inference will create continuous demand for efficient, high-performance computing.

Across the wider GCC, the opportunity extends beyond GPUs. Customers will need complete AI infrastructure: computing systems, networking, software, models and technical expertise. NVIDIA’s role is to provide that full-stack platform and work with the ecosystem to move AI from experimentation into reliable, large-scale production.

Most market commentary on the artificial intelligence boom trades in forecasts. Mickey M Maini prefers to take measurements. The founder of Solstice Laboratory, a Dubai-based research lab that applies physics to financial and geopolitical systems, and author of The Entropy Trap: What Physics Knows That Markets Don’t, Maini reads markets the way physicists read systems under stress, separating how loaded a system is from how fast it is moving. On that framework, he argues, the debt-funded AI infrastructure buildout is showing real structural stress but has not yet tipped.

In this interview with Gulf Business, he explains why the compute will outlast some of the balance sheets financing it, why machine-speed markets have quietly removed the time economies assume they have to self-correct, and why energy, not chips, will decide who wins the AI race. For the Gulf, his message is pointed: compute is the next scarce strategic resource, and a region that spent 50 years mastering the economics of oil has answered this question before, provided it treats its position as infrastructure to maintain, not luck to enjoy.

Does the current AI infrastructure buildout, largely funded through debt, show the kind of structural stress signals your framework is designed to pick up, similar to past pre-transition periods?

Yes, but not the signal most people expect. Stress is not the same as transition. Our gauges separate the two: how loaded a system is, and how fast it is moving. Right now the AI buildout reads loaded, not yet moving.

Here is what changed this year. The buildout used to be paid for out of cash flow. Now it is paid for with borrowed money. Capital spending by the big platforms is heading toward seven hundred billion dollars this year, and by one Wall Street count it now consumes close to all of their operating cash flow, against roughly forty per cent as the average of the past decade. AI-linked debt issuance has more than doubled in a year. In physics terms, the system lost its natural brake. Cash flow is self-limiting. Debt is reflexive.

We have tested this pattern against history. British railways in the 1840s. American fibre in the 1990s. The infrastructure was real, the financing was not, and the two outcomes separated. The paper burned. The rails and the fibre carried the next fifty years of growth.

So the honest reading: the compute will survive. Some of the balance sheets will not. What we watch is one simple line: the moment new borrowing starts servicing old borrowing instead of building new capacity. It has not been crossed. It is close enough to measure.

Does AI-driven, algorithmic trading moving at machine speed break the basic assumption most economic models rely on, that markets have time to self-correct?

No, and that is the uncomfortable part. Self-correction is not a law of markets. It is an assumption, and it rests on two quiet conditions: time and diversity. Markets correct when participants have time to disagree, and when they actually disagree. Machine speed removes the first. Crowding into the same trades removes the second.

Physics has a name for this. A system stays stable when it can relax faster than it is shocked. When the shock arrives faster than the response, the system does not bend. It snaps to a new state. We have already watched corrections that once took a year compress into a quarter, then a week, then an afternoon. The machines did not change the physics. They removed the time everyone assumed they had.

Our answer is not to be faster than the machines. Nobody outside a server rack wins that race. Our answer is to be earlier. We measure the conditions under which speed becomes dangerous: how crowded positioning is, how closely assets move together, how thin the buffers are. Right now those gauges show correlations unusually high and market calm unusually deep, while the physical world runs hot. That gap is exactly where fast markets get hurt.

The practical rule is old, and it still holds. You cannot react your way out of a fast market. You can only be positioned before it. Speed rewards the prepared and punishes the reflexive.

Does AI compute becoming a sovereign-level resource rather than a commercial one change how a region like the Gulf, where sovereign capital and state strategy already play an outsized role, should be thinking about its position?

It changes everything, and the Gulf should recognise the moment, because it has lived it before. For fifty years this region has run the most successful strategic resource economy in the world. The playbook is written. The owner of a scarce input sets terms. Refine at home rather than export raw. Convert the windfall into permanent institutions. The sovereign funds of this region are that playbook made durable.

Compute is the next scarce input. Gold anchored trade. Oil powered industry. Intelligence runs on compute, and compute runs on energy, land, capital and trusted jurisdiction. Those are the four abundances of the Gulf. That is why the region holds a genuine seat at this table rather than a spectator’s ticket.

The shift to make is mental. Compute stops being procurement and becomes statecraft. A large compute agreement today deserves the questions an oil concession deserved in the 1930s. Who owns the asset? Who operates it? Who sets the price of its output? Where the knowledge ends up. Regions that asked those questions built national champions. Regions that did not spent decades buying back what sat under their feet.

And one measurement, because measurement is our trade. The region should track its share of global compute capacity with the same seriousness it once tracked its share of oil capacity. What you measure, you manage. What you manage, you keep.

Does the energy demand from AI data centres, rather than chip supply, represent the bigger constraint on who actually wins the AI race, in your view?

Energy, without much doubt. Chips are a factory problem, and factories scale. You can build a chip plant in three years. Electrons are a physics and permissions problem. Power plants, transmission lines and grid connections move on decade clocks, and the queue for a grid connection in the West now runs to years. Money is not the constraint either. Capital is chasing this buildout at historic scale. The constraint is the socket.

The numbers say it plainly. Data centre capacity worldwide is set to roughly double by 2030, while the utilities that must feed it are investing at a fraction of the required pace. When one input is abundant, and another is fixed, value migrates to the fixed one. That is not opinion. That is how every shortage in history has been priced.

So the AI race will not be won by whoever designs the cleverest model. It will be won by whoever delivers dispatchable power at scale, fastest, with the fewest permits in the way. Read the map through that lens, and it redraws itself toward energy-rich jurisdictions that can build. The UAE understood this early. Nuclear at the Barakah plant, gas, solar at scale, and land next to all three.

The industrial age asked who has the oil. The intelligence age asks who has the electrons. It is the same question wearing new clothes, and this region has answered it before.

Does a neutral hub like the UAE gain a lasting edge as AI becomes a geopolitical fault line alongside debt and fragmentation, or is that advantage more temporary than people assume?

It can be lasting. It is not automatic. Neutrality is a position you maintain, not a prize you keep. In a fragmenting world, flows do not stop. They reroute. The node that stays open, connected and trusted collects the toll on that rerouting. That is the physics of hubs, and it has held across a thousand years of trade history.

But the position has a maintenance schedule. Four things sustain it. Energy, which this country has. Connectivity, which it keeps building. When the region’s main artery came under pressure this year, the answer was new pipeline capacity toward Fujairah and new corridors, which is exactly what an adaptive hub looks like. Rule of law and capital mobility are why families and firms keep arriving. And now compute, the fourth utility.

History grades both outcomes. Venice held the middleman position for three centuries because it kept investing in the things that made it central. Amsterdam lost the crown to London in a generation once it stopped. The edge is temporary for hubs that treat it as luck, and lasting for hubs that treat it as infrastructure. On the evidence of the past few years, the UAE is behaving like the second kind.

The gauge we watch is stickiness. Of the capital and talent that arrived in the stress years, how much stays once calm returns? Passing traffic is revenue. Traffic that settles is destiny.

You call yourself a measurer, not a forecaster. You say the AI buildout is loaded but not yet moving. What are the gauges that will tell us it is tipping, and what should investors here do when they move?

Three dials, and all of them can be read from public information.

The first is funding quality. Watch whether new borrowing in the AI buildout is creating capacity or servicing old borrowing. Every infrastructure boom in history crossed that line quietly before it broke loudly. It has not been crossed yet. When it is, the weakest financing goes first while the strongest assets keep running.

The second is power delivered against power promised. Announcements are free. Megawatts are not. When the gap between connected capacity and announced capacity widens, timelines slip. Slipped timelines are what turn debt from fuel into weight.

The third is the price of trust. Watch what gold does against the money supply while all of this is being financed. It is the oldest gauge of confidence in paper promises, and it currently sits at levels that reward attention.

What to do about them is architecture, not heroics. Hold a foundation that does not depend on the financing weather: real assets, and the physical layer of the buildout itself- power, grid, the inputs intelligence cannot scale without. Keep paper claims short. And keep liquidity, because the discipline that feels like dead weight in calm times becomes ammunition on the day the dials move.

When the ground shakes, the sorting begins, and the prepared side of the room does the buying. Our work is making sure you can see the dials before that day.

Private schools across the UAE are requiring parents to sign Codes of Conduct that set out expectations for behaviour, communication and cooperation between families and schools, including a prohibition on using social status to belittle or threaten others.

The codes establish responsibilities for both parents and schools and set standards for interactions within the school community.

Read more-UAE to introduce AI curriculum across public, private schools: What’s to know

Among the requirements for parents are treating staff, students and other parents respectfully, avoiding aggressive language or raised voices, and addressing concerns through appropriate channels.

Parents told Emarat Al Youm that their children’s schools had introduced the codes to clarify the responsibilities of families and schools and to support a safe and respectful learning environment.

The rules, which cover about 20 provisions in one code reviewed by Emarat Al Youm, also require parents to take responsibility for their children’s behaviour, follow school policies and support academic integrity.

Respect and responsible communication

The code requires parents to respect the school’s vision, mission, values and educational environment. It applies not only to interactions with teachers and administrators but also to dealings with students, security guards, workers and other parents.

Parents are expected to maintain professional and constructive relationships with members of the school community, with the interests of students remaining a central consideration.

The rules also recognise education and student safety as shared responsibilities between schools and families. Parents are expected to work with schools on issues affecting their children’s learning, behaviour and development rather than treating these matters as the sole responsibility of either side.

At home, this includes supporting children’s participation in learning activities, ensuring they receive sufficient sleep and healthy food, and encouraging appropriate physical activity.

Parents are also expected to act as role models through their language and behaviour.

When parents have concerns, the code requires them to raise those issues professionally, either verbally or in writing. This includes avoiding shouting, aggressive language or attempts to use social standing to belittle, intimidate or threaten others.

The rules also cover parents’ use of social media. Parents must not publish material that conflicts with the policies or regulations of the relevant educational authorities concerning cultural considerations in schools, or material that breaches school policies.

Disputes should be handled constructively

The code encourages parents to consider both their child’s account of an incident and the school’s perspective when a disagreement occurs.

The stated aim is to resolve disputes through peaceful and constructive communication rather than allowing conflicts to escalate.

Parents are also responsible for addressing inappropriate behaviour by their children or any child under their care when that behaviour leads to a dispute, creates an unsafe situation or interferes with other students’ ability to learn.

The requirements extend to conduct on school premises. Parents must follow the school’s general policies and are expected to dress and behave in a manner that respects the UAE’s national identity, cultural values and applicable laws and regulations.

Attendance and punctuality are also included. Parents are expected to ensure that their children attend school regularly and arrive on time, while avoiding holidays or other travel plans during official school days outside scheduled school breaks.

They must also monitor their children’s academic performance and ensure that students arrive at school and are collected at the designated times.

Academic integrity and parental involvement

The code places particular emphasis on honesty in dealings between parents and schools.

Parents must not provide unnecessary assistance that undermines a student’s work or give false information, including forged documents or false explanations for absences.

They are also expected to respond when teachers request parent-teacher meetings and to maintain regular communication with the school about their child’s academic and personal development.

Where a school recommends additional educational support, parents are expected to cooperate with those recommendations when such support is considered necessary to improve the student’s learning, progress or development.

The rules also set out consequences for failing to meet minimum requirements. Schools may, at their discretion, ask a parent to leave the premises or refuse entry if the stated requirements are ignored or not respected.

Schools have responsibilities too

The Code of Conduct does not place obligations solely on parents. Schools are also expected to facilitate parental involvement in students’ learning and development by providing access to relevant information, staff, resources and support.

Schools must promote polite, respectful and professional communication with parents and provide direct access to staff responsible for planning or delivering additional support.

This can include inclusion assistants, counsellors and social workers, depending on the student’s needs.

Teachers and other educational staff are also expected to communicate with parents when necessary to discuss academic or behavioural concerns involving a student.

Schools are further required to provide parents with periodic reminders about expected staff response times during working hours. Alternative contact information must also be made available for emergencies.

Taken together, the provisions establish a framework in which parents are expected to follow school rules and support their children’s education, while schools are expected to maintain communication and provide appropriate support.

For families, the codes make clear that the relationship with a school involves responsibilities on both sides, with respectful communication and cooperation forming the basis for addressing academic, behavioural and safety-related issues.