UNESCO hails Turkey’s education policy on refugees

A UNESCO report praised Turkey as well as Lebanon and Jordan for their inclusive education policies towards Syrian refugees.

In 2019 Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report titled "Migration, displacement and education: Building bridges, not walls", the UN body said that Turkey is committed to including Syrian children in its education system.

The report read: "Turkey hosts 1 million refugees of school age and has committed to include them in its national education system by 2020, as opposed to countries such Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Thailand where no such promises have been made."

"The funding secured for Turkey's move to inclusive education will be spent on school construction, and to provide 15 hours of Turkish lessons a week, in addition to catch-up education and remedial classes," it read.

The report said that "free school transport, education materials, a new examination system, guidance and counseling, a communication strategy to educate parents on enrollment would also be introduced and 15,000 teachers trained."

Turkey, which hosts more Syrian refugees than any other country in the world, has spent more than €30 billion from its own national resources for helping and sheltering refugees since the beginning of the Syrian civil war.

The UNESCO report also praised Lebanon and Jordan, as they "integrated refugees into public schools by adopting a double-shift system."

"In 2016, 160 of Lebanon's 1,350 public schools were running double-shifts. To improve take-up, the Lebanese government piloted offering conditional cash transfers for education and saw refugee attendance rise by 20 percent."

Calling for international support to help the countries reach their ambitions for fully inclusive education, the UN body said that the "quality of education would suffer without greater international support to the countries hosting most Syrian refugees."

"Teachers' salaries are the most expensive part of any education bill and Turkey needs 80,000 teachers to teach all current refugees. In Lebanon, only 55 percent of teachers and staff had participated in professional development in the previous two years."

"Better international support is needed to help these countries make the leap to fully inclusive refugee education," said Manos Antoninis, Director of the GEM report, as quoted in the report.

The report also recommended countries to protect the right to education of migrants and displaced people, to include them in the national education system and to prepare teachers of migrants and refugees to address diversity and hardship.

It also called on countries to "represent migration and displacement histories in education accurately to challenge prejudices."