World Refugee Day: Action to get every refugee child into school
There are 43.4 million refugees worldwide and more than 19 million of them are children. Credit: UNHRC
World Refugee Day is held on 20th June every year, and this year marks record levels of displacement, as more than half of the world’s 19 million refugee children are out of school.
Refugee education is vitally important to provide hope and skills for the future, reduce the risk of violence and increase protection from conflict, as well as to create a sense of normality.
We share a collective obligation to the 10 million refugee children who are not in school. Having already lost their homes, they are now losing their education, and the international community must ensure their right to education is fulfilled through strengthening their inclusion in national education systems.
Every year on June 20th, World Refugee Day is celebrated worldwide to honour the strength and courage of people forced to flee their home country to escape conflict or persecution.
It also provides an opportunity to illuminate the state of the global response to refugee movements.
Record levels of displacement
At the end of 2024, an estimated 123.2 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations, and events seriously disturbing the public order.
43.4 million are refugees - people who have crossed an international border in search of protection - and more than 19 million of them are children.
Almost half of these 19 million children aren’t in school, with even fewer than half attending secondary school.
The vital importance of refugee education
Evidence shows that limited access to education contributes to a heightened risk of violence and conflict, creating a vicious cycle of lost educational opportunities, conflict, and displacement.
In addition to offering refugee families hope, knowledge, and skills for the future, education provides a safe space, a sense of normality, and protection from conflict, but also from trafficking, child marriage, sexual exploitation, and forced labour, to which refugee children are particularly at risk.
Inclusion: the path to closing the refugee education gap
The growing number of refugee children, together with the increasing length of their displacement, means that including refugee children in the education system of their host country is the most practical and sustainable way to provide displaced children with accredited and certified learning opportunities that can be monitored for quality.
In practice, this means refugees studying in the same classroom with host-country learners, ideally after a short transition period designed to support the development of language skills (for those who do not speak the primary language of the host country) and to support integration.
Contrary to widespread perceptions in wealthier regions, 67 per cent of refugees stay in neighbouring countries, with low and middle-income countries hosting 73 per cent of the world’s refugees.
These countries often struggle to deliver education to their own citizens.
Countries hosting refugees perform a global public good for the international community and should be supported.
However, cuts to humanitarian assistance in general and for the UN refugee agency in particular mean that low-income countries hosting large refugee populations will no longer have the resources to open their education systems to refugees.
Putting inclusion into practice
Ensuring access to education might seem straightforward, but is often complex.
Language and cultural differences often present challenges.
Unsurprisingly, the education needs of refugee students are complex. They may have already missed years of schooling and be unfamiliar with the local curriculum and language of instruction. Many displaced children have experienced severe trauma and require psychological support. Refugee girls, particularly adolescents, are two and a half times more likely to be out of school.
Refugee children are also not often familiar with the curriculum or assessments, so adjustments to both need to be considered to ensure equitable learning and measure progress.
Therefore, inclusion is much more than merely providing access to school. It requires creating safe, supportive learning environments where high-quality education can be delivered.
This might include training host country teachers to teach and support learners of other languages, providing support to schools for basic mental health and psychosocial support, or running remedial programmes to allow students to catch up on lost learning.
The time to act is now
We share a collective obligation to the 10 million refugee children who are not in school. Having already lost their homes, they are now losing their education. They are not responsible for the conflict that has driven them out of their country. And they have a legal right to an education – a right that doesn’t end in times of emergency.
Once children finish school, they should also have opportunities to access technical, vocational, and tertiary education.
Delivering the promise of the Global Compact
The Global Compact on Refugees agreed in 2020 secured an essential and dynamic shift in how refugee education is supported and delivered.
It laid out a clear goal for inclusion – where refugee children attend public schools alongside host community children, and crucially, where financing flows through government channels to support this.
The vision was that refugee education forms part of national education plans, so host governments and the international community are accountable for improving access to quality education for refugees and host community children.
Ultimately, the education-focused provisions of the Global Compact signalled to host governments that the international community will be an ally and partner in sharing the responsibility of delivering quality education to refugee and host community children.
Cuts to development and humanitarian financing threaten the progress made in the Compact's commitments to refugee inclusion.
Those cuts should be reversed, and the international community should once again commit to ensuring that becoming a refugee doesn’t mean losing the right to receive an education.