Abstract
Since the war in Syria started in 2011, many children left their war-torn country, alone or together with their families, and fled to neighboring countries in the Middle East, to Turkey or to Europe. This article will compare how Syrian refugee children are included – or not - in school systems both in Europe (Sweden, Germany and Greece) and outside Europe (Turkey and Lebanon). These five countries represent very different ways of receiving children in their educational system. We will compare national institutional arrangements like access to compulsory school, access after compulsory school age, welcome or immersion classes, second language education and tracking mechanisms. Including children as soon as possible in regular classes seems to provide the best chances for school success, whereas educating refugee children in a segregated parallel school system for extended periods often results in early school leaving or not attending school at all.
Highlights
The research debate covering the political crises around refugees has largely been addressing issues like border control, EU policies – or the lack thereof – and the political backlash in the form of anti-immigrant sentiments
We will make a cross-country comparison of the five most important institutional arrangements we identified through our literature review as having a major influence on the school careers of refugee children: (1) entrance into compulsory education; (2) so-called welcome, submersion or introduction classes; (3) second language instruction; (4) tracking; (5) education after compulsory schooling
To make a comparison which shows the effect of different educational arrangements and different policies of including refugee children in education we chose two Northern European countries that strongly differ from each other (Sweden and Germany), one South European country (Greece) and two neighbouring countries of Syria (Turkey and Lebanon) that differ a lot in their approach to including Syrian refugee children in education
Summary
The research debate covering the political crises around refugees has largely been addressing issues like border control, EU policies – or the lack thereof – and the political backlash in the form of anti-immigrant sentiments. Follow-up questions about the integration of refugees and their children into society, education and work are appearing on the agenda too. The current attention to the issue of the integration of the children of refugees into education is recent, several researchers in Europe have addressed the question for previous waves of refugee children. For this article we have worked together as scholars from five countries affected by a large inflow of Syrian refugees to gather literature (mostly in the national language) about the situation of refugee children in these countries. The literature gathered for this article suggests that, even when the field is rapidly expanding,
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