UN urges more efforts to integrate migrant children in schools
PARIS:
The United Nations called on countries to step up efforts to integrate the growing numbers of refugee and migrant children worldwide into their education systems.
The number of school-age migrant and refugee children has risen 26% since 2000 to some 18 million, the Unesco cultural agency wrote in its 2019 Global Education Monitoring report.
Around half the world’s forcibly displaced people are under 18, and often have little if any access to public education systems in the countries where they are seeking asylum.
Even if they are not excluded outright, host countries often lack the resources to offer language classes and ensure the integration of refugee children.
Lebanon and Jordan, with the largest number of refugees per capita as people fled the civil war in neighbouring Syria, have imposed separate morning and afternoon classes for citizens and refugees.
Even wealthy Germany would need 42,000 new teachers to properly educate the refugee children taken in as part of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door policy enacted in 2015, which has since been sharp- ly curtailed, the report found.
“Education is the key to inclusion and cohesion,” Unesco’s chief Audrey Azoulay said in a statement.
“Increased classroom diversity, while challenging for teachers, can also enhance respect for diversity and be an opportunity to learn from others,” she said.
The report also found that firstgeneration migrants represented 18% of students in high-income countries in 2017, up from 15% in 2005, representing 36 million students.
“Countries cannot think the job is done once immigrants are in school,” said Manos Antoninis, director of the education report.
Too often, he said, “they end up in slower school tracks or in under-resourced establishments in troubled neighbourhoods.”