Page 28 - IO1-Report

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

Figure 6 Number of Syrian Students with more than 10 days of non-attendance by grade level (Akyuz et al. 2019)

As it can be seen from the graph, the non-attendance rates of refugee children are very high. The
reasons for this are manifold, two are for example child labour or early marriage (Akyuz et al. 2019).
Although Turkey has approved the international conventions that prohibit child labour, there are lots of
unregistered children working in the industry and with the mass influx from Syria the problem of child
labour deepened. The main problem is that the ban on child labour does not apply to farms with fewer
than 50 employees. Therefore, many working children are employed in the agricultural sector –
however, their work is often necessary for Syrian families living in extremely precarious situations to
survive. This, too, is an imbalance that must be taken into account when it comes to integration and
living together. In summary, the Turkish government has opened the public school system to Syrian
refugees. However, there are many challenges. A two-shift system has been introduced at state schools
to ensure that Syrian refugees also have access to education. However, the state schools do not have
the necessary quantitative and qualitative capacities, the latter especially concerning language barriers
but also dealing with stereotypes and discrimination.

3.3. Examples of good practice from Turkey

Because of the high number of refugee children, in September 2014 the Ministry of National Education
(MoNE) has regulated Educational and Learning Services for Foreigners (Taşkın and Erdemli 2018).
Since lots of refugee children has been under protection, according to the research done by the General
Directorate of Immigration Administration in 2016, there have been lots of camps and temporary
accommodation for migrants and refugees.
Good Practice 1: Temporary camp education centres (TECs) have been established and available for
both refugee children and their families’ education, but the centres provided only primary school level.
Although camp education centres have been established by AFAD (the Disaster and Emergency
Management Presidency), the lessons and the curriculum was not fixed. Moreover, teachers in the
camps haven’t actually been teachers in their professional lives, few of them were teachers back in Syria
and there have been university pupils or other people from other professions among them, so TEC’s are
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