Human Rights Watch urges reforms to guarantee Syrian refugee children’s access to education

BEIRUT — A report published Friday by Human Rights Watch estimates that thousands of Syrian refugee children remain out of school and urged the Lebanese government to implement the necessary policy reforms to overcome “petty, discriminatory rules that are still undermining education for refugee children a decade after the Syria conflict began.”

Here’s what we know:

    • HRW recommended the extension of the Lebanese government’s Dec. 4 deadline for Syrian children’s enrollment into schools and the implementation of policy reforms that guarantee Syrian refugees’ access to education.

    • HRW estimates that the necessity to present “certified educational records, legal residency in Lebanon, and other official documents that many Syrians cannot obtain” has translated to thousands of Syrian children being unable to attend schools.

    • The current school registration system for Syrian refugees requires the Education Ministry to send a question-and-answer document and a list of schools that “will run second-shift classes for these children” to the NGOs responsible for enrolling the children. In order to enrol in regular classes, there must be a facility under capacity after “Lebanese children are enrolled.” In 2021, these documents were respectively sent out on Nov. 29 and Nov. 30., providing a very narrow registration window before the Dec. 4 deadline.

    • Lebanon hosts 660,000 school-age Syrian refugee children, but 30 percent — 200,000 — have never been to school and 60 percent have not gone to school in recent years.

    • The report cites the Norwegian Refugee Council’s advocacy manager in Lebanon Elena Dikomitis as saying that “many children who were blocked from attending school by documentation requirements end up working in the streets, after living in displacement for almost a decade.” A UN vulnerability assessment of Syrian refugees in Lebanon had determined that 4.4 percent of children in that cohort were engaged in child labor.

    • Another barrier to education mentioned in the HRW report is the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and the momentary transition to online learning that only an estimated 17 percent of Syrian refugee children could access. To resume classes, children who missed two years of school must complete an accelerated learning program, new sessions of which have not been available in the past two years. Similarly, HRW estimates that 40,000 Syrian refugee children were enrolled in informal schools but the transition from formal to informal education or the certification of the currently non-formal learning sectors remains a great challenge.