Expanding Refugee Access to National Education Systems: The State of the Evidence on Enabling Factors, Constraints, and Interventions

Access to education remains out of reach for half of refugee children and youth. Average gross enrolment rates stand at 38% for pre-primary, 65% for primary, 41% for secondary and 6% for tertiary education. Despite increasing research, evidence remains limited of what works, how, for whom, under what conditions and at what cost to improve refugee student access in countries of first asylum to national education systems (NES). To inform evidence-based decision making across policy, practice, advocacy and research, the ERICC programme reviewed and synthesised existing research on refugee access to NES.

This policy brief summarises actionable findings from the ERICC Evidence Review: Expanding Refugee Access to National Education Systems: The State of the Evidence (forthcoming) to further highlight evidence gaps and research needs. These findings may be particularly useful for government agencies, donor organisations, humanitarian and development actors, and research bodies. The policy brief describes the substantive, methodological and geographic scope of existing evidence on refugee student access to NES. It then presents findings about six global-, regional- and national-level enabling factors and constraints for refugee student access to NES: financing, education infrastructure and sector capacity, political will and support for refugee inclusion, governance and coordination arrangements, non-state actor engagement and data systems. Local and child-level risk and protective factors further influencing refugee access to NES are presented in the third section of the brief, including: gender, socioeconomic and legal status, language barriers, perceptions of education relevance, and xenophobia, gender-based violence and intolerance. The fourth section synthesises evidence on interventions used in refugee-hosting contexts to improve student access: global and regional frameworks that support refugee inclusion; double shift schools; recognition, validation and accreditation of prior learning, flexible learning programmes, and host country language acquisition; cash transfers; and school feeding.

Finally, this brief presents research needs which stakeholders can prioritise to significantly improve the evidence base for (cost-)effective, inclusive and scalable interventions that enhance refugee student access to education.