Mr. Darren Goodall (MBA) joined the Maarif Head Office team in August 2023 as the Head of Safeguarding, providing executive leadership to the Occupational Health and Safety, Child Protection and Wellbeing departments for all Maarif Education schools. Prior to moving into Head Office, Darren was the Director of Quality and Development at Ajyal International School in Dhahran, where he also assumed the Child Protection Officer (CPO) role for the school.

Darren comes with an extensive background in educational, regulatory services and safeguarding executive leadership, having worked for over 25 years in both the private and public sectors in Australia, the United Arab Emirates and now in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where, prior to joining Maarif Education, he worked as the Director of Operations at a private school in Jeddah for over 2.5 years.

During this time, Darren was also the school’s CPO and the Council of International Schools (CIS) coordinator during the entire team evaluation process, which resulted in the school successfully receiving full CIS school accreditation.

In addition to being a former Australian police officer and having worked extensively with children at risk
for over 25 years, Darren is a qualified English, Humanities and German teacher (Australia) and has also
taught in local and private schools in both Australia and the Middle East for over 10 years.

Darren’s strategic safeguarding vision and mission is centered around three (3) core foundational pillars
- Systems, Capability and Governance. This strategic approach focuses on ensuring that Maarif Education’s safeguarding business operations have the right system practices in place to drive organizational outcomes, have the right people in the right positions performing the right work, and use clear and concise quality assurance measures to collect and analyze business data to genuinely inform continuous improvement outcomes across all safeguarding departments and functions.