The State of Qatar enacted a decree in November of 2002 to establish a new K-12 education system with the goal of improving student outcomes in Qatar.  Implementation of this reform called for the establishment of four new permanent organizations to provide the infrastructure and support new schools.

NORC's role within the overall reform is to assist one of the new organizations, the Evaluation Institute's Office of Data Collection and Management, in building the capacity needed to collect data to support and assess the reform.  This included development of a large-scale survey of students, and other methodologies to collect data from teachers and parents.  It also involved the creation and implementation of a Qatar national education data system to track the reform.  The QNEDS work has three major components:

• development of an integrated data warehouse and portal to provide a comprehensive picture of education in Qatar
• development of comprehensive suite of IT systems to facilitate survey operations, data collection and processing
• build local capacity for the training of field staff, logistics and operation of data collection, survey design, and the development of system requirements and user acceptance testing