Friends give Syrian children a route off the streets and back into class

Lebanon hosts more than 935,000 registered Syrian refugees, the highest concentration of refugees in proportion to the national population, which is just over six million people.

More than half of Syrian refugee children in the country do not attend formal education, even though the Lebanese authorities have organized special afternoon shifts in state-run schools for Syrian students.

Many children have also missed years of schooling and struggle to meet the minimum educational levels required to enrol.

To address this, the Lebanese Ministry of Education has published a framework for non-formal education that is designed to give children who have been out of the classroom for at least two years – or never been at all – a chance to enter public schools.

This is achieved through accelerated education programmes, aimed at helping children who are out of school to catch up with the curriculum. A minimum level of learning is required to attend accelerated education programmes, which is where community centre programmes offering basic literacy and numeracy classes, such as the Borderless centre in Beirut, have a role to play.

Over the past two years, more than 90 children from the centre have gone on to enrol in public schools.

Even where children are unable to enrol because of a lack of places or funding, the programme still provides important benefits, said Vanan Mandjikian, Assistant Education Officer for UNHCR’s Mount Lebanon field office.

“This programme is essential for the future … because basic literacy is something very important for every child,” she said.

This story is featured in UNHCR’s 2019 education report Stepping Up: Refugee Education in Crisis. The report shows that as refugee children grow older, the barriers preventing them from accessing education become harder to overcome: only 63 per cent of refugee children go to primary school, compared to 91 per cent globally. Around the world, 84 per cent of adolescents get a secondary education, while only 24 per cent of refugees get the opportunity. Of the 7.1 million refugee children of school age, 3.7 million – more than half – do not go to school.

*SOURCE: UNHCR. Go to ORIGINAL. 2019 Human Wrongs Watch