The Education of Refugee Children in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Turkey: A lost generation?
Maurice Crul, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Free University of Amsterdam
Session: January 19, 2:20-2:40PM
In the Paper we compare the way four countries incorporate refugee children in their educational systems. Turkey created a parallel system of education in Arabic for most of the children. The object is not to integrate the children in the Turkish school system. In Germany and the Netherlands the object is to integrate them in the national school systems but ‘de facto’ children are almost all geared into the most marginal streams of vocational education. Sweden is the only country in the comparison, which has as goal and also provides opportunities in reality to access all potential school levels including pre-academic tracks and higher education. The Paper examines which educational institutional arrangements need to be in place to provide equal opportunities for refugee children to succeed in school.