UNESCO Report on migration and education: Turkey hosted the most

 The focus of the UNESCO’s 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report is on migration and the social policies pertaining specifically to their education and assimilation. 

Titled Migration, displacement & education: Building Bridges, Not Walls, and the report explores the education policy measures undertaken by host countries for migrants and refugees. The report is published by UN but is independently funded and staffed. 

The report highlights the efforts by countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey  for inclusive refugee education policies, where almost a third of the world’s refugees are hosted, over half of whom are over the age of 18.

  

• At the end of 2017, seven countries hosted 51% of the world’s 19.9 million refugees, excluding Palestinian refugees. Turkey hosted the most (3.5 million). In addition, 5.4 million Palestinian refugees lived in four countries. In total, low and middle income countries hosted about 89% of refugees 
• As of 2018, Turkey hosts 3.5 million refugees, 1 million of whom are school-age.
• Inclusive education: 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. Free school transport, education materials, a new examination system, guidance and counselling, a communication strategy to educate parents on enrollment will be introduced and 15,000 teachers trained.
• Both Lebanon and Jordan, with the highest number of refugees per capita in the world have 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%. 
• Right to work: Lebanon and Jordan are praised for giving refugees the right to enroll in higher education and to work, when less than one-quarter of global migrants globally are covered by a bilateral recognition agreement. In Turkey, the national employment agency is working with several international organizations to overcome the administrative obstacles for making jobs accessible to Syrian refugees and to develop vocational training programmes. Jordan has issued or renewed over 100,000 work permits for Syrian refugees since 2016.