BOX 3.1:
Turkey and Serbia have made efforts to register and include refugee children in public education
In recent years, the region has witnessed large flows of migrant and
displaced populations as a result of the Syrian civil war. This has
challenged countries located along the route of these flows.
Turkey hosts 3.6 million Syrian refugees (UNHCR, 2020a), 1.1 million of
whom are of school age. The first refugees crossed into the country
in 2011, immediately spreading beyond camps. Non-government and
faith-based organizations established informal schools, staffed by
volunteer teachers, offering instruction in Arabic and using a modified
Syrian curriculum. These temporary education centres (TECs) were
largely unregulated, operated outside the national system and had
limited quality assurance or standardization of certification at the end
of grades 9 and 12.
In late 2014, the Ministry of National Education established a
regulatory framework for TECs. Syrian families could choose
enrolment in TECs or public schools (Turkey Ministry of National
Education, 2014). TECs not meeting regulations were closed. In August
2016, the government announced that all Syrian children would be
integrated into the national education system. Among those enrolled,
the share of Syrian children in TECs fell from 83% in 2014/15 to 4% in
2019/20. The government required all TECs to offer 15 hours of Turkish
language instruction per week to prepare students for transition to
Turkish schools.
Children with a foreigner identification number were entered into the
main management information system, e-Okul, while those with a
temporary protection identification document were entered into a
tailor-made system, YÖBIS, which was compatible with e-Okul. YÖBIS
was first used in TECs in 2015 (Turkey Government and UNICEF, 2019).
Subsequent improvements, such as its linkage with the Integrated
Social Assistance Information System, allowed its attendance records
to be used as an eligibility criterion for awarding a conditional cash
transfer for education (Ring et al., 2020) (see
Chapter 4
) .
The inclusion process has been supported by Promoting Integration
of Syrian Children to the Turkish Education System, a project that
received EUR 300 million as part of the European Union’s EUR
3 billion Facility for Refugees in Turkey (Delegation of the European
Union in Turkey, 2017). Two-fifths financed school construction; the
rest was allocated to Turkish and Arabic language courses, catch-up
education and remedial classes, free school transport, education
materials, an examination system, guidance and counselling, training
of 15,000 teachers and hiring of administrative personnel (Arik Akyuz,
2018). However, there is still a lot left to do. The percentage of out-of-
school children fell rapidly, from 70% in 2014/15 to 38% in 2017/18, but
was still at 37% two years later (
Figure 3.6
).
Refugee and asylum-seeker movements along the so-called Balkan
corridor reached their peak in 2015. While the challenge there was
on a much smaller scale than in Turkey, governments had to find
education continuity solutions for thousands of children about whom
neither the education trajectory nor the intention to stay in the
country were known.
In Serbia, in collaboration with UNICEF and the Centre for Education
Policy, the government piloted an approach in two municipalities
and 10 schools in 2016/17. In 2017, the Ministry of Education, Science
and Technological Development adopted instructions for inclusion
of refugee and asylum-seeking students into the education system,
with schools obliged to prepare and implement support plans at
the school and individual levels. These plans cover aspects such as
adaptation and stress relief, intensive learning of Serbian, participation
in regular syllabus and extracurricular activities and adaptation of
school attendance schedule and teaching materials. By 2018/19, about
2,500 or 98% of pre- and primary school-age children in reception
centres had been placed in public schools (Serbia Government, 2019).
However, an independent study by the Belgrade Centre for Human
Rights estimated that just 14% of refugee and asylum-seeking
children attended regularly, an indicator not monitored by the
information management system (ECRE, 2019).
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