Page 25 - IO1-Report

KA201 - Strategic Partnerships for School Education
The Universal Language of Mathematics (2018-1-TR01-KA201-059704)

Figure 4: number of refugees in Turkey over years. (Göç İdaresi, 2020)

Turkey has experienced significant refugee flows over the years as mentioned above. However, with
the war in Syria, Turkey has faced yet a significantly bigger challenge with refugees coming to Turkey
from its neighbouring regions. Since March 2011, over 4 million people have fled civil war in Syria to
neighbouring countries such as, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon (Koca, 2015).. In the context of
the refugee movements from Syria to Turkey since 2011, Turkey has pursued a policy of largely open
borders, i.e. granting temporary protection to refugees as “guests” from Syria, because, as mentioned
above, Turkey does not recognise non-European refugees under the Geneva Convention. These “guests”
were subject to the non-refoulement principle but lacked the rights such as education, work, health etc.

3.2. The situation of refugee and migrant children in Turkey

In Turkey, there are almost 4 million refugees mostly from Syria (3.6 million approximately) as
mentioned in the first part, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran etc. adding up to more than 4 million refugees as of
November 30, 2019 (UNHCR 2019). Furthermore, Turkey hosts with 1.7 million the largest number of
refugee children in the world (UNICEF 2017). The number of children at school age from countries other
than Syria, most of which being Afghani, Iraqi, Iranian and Somalian was 42,221 in 2016 (Akyuz et al.
2019). As of 2019, approximately 680,000 of these children are registered to schools and getting their
formal education whereas almost 400,000 of them are outside of school (UNICEF 2018).
The influx of this large number of refugee children and adolescents have posed enormous challenges
for Turkey, especially considering Turkey’s lack of experience in the context of immigration as mentioned
in chapter 3.1., which have had some negative results in different contexts including education. Syrian
children were forbidden to go to school in Turkey until 2014 because - according to the government's
interpretation - it was assumed that they would go back to Syria after the end of the war. When it
became clear that the war was not going to end soon, it was decided to allow the children to go to
school - especially to promote their social integration into Turkish society, as Yusuf Büyük (Deputy
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