SUMMARY
The Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children (OOSCI), launched by UNICEF and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Institute of Statistics (UIS) in 2010, is an important component of global monitoring of educational participation. The OOSCI supports the interrelated tasks of developing out-of-school children (OOSC) profiles, linking quantitative and qualitative data to various barriers, and identifying effective strategies to address the OOSC problem (UNICEF-UIS, 2015). The initiative has a national, regional and global dimension and aims at action-oriented research and outcomes in the area of capacity development (UNICEF, Formative Evaluation of the Out-of-School Children Initiative (OOSCI), 2018a).
Almost all Turkish children complete primary and lower secondary education. However, the influx of approximately 4 million Syrian (and other) refugees since 2011, including nearly 2 million children, has created a unique situation in terms of vulnerability and OOSC (UNICEF, 2019a). The Turkish government has made commendable efforts to address the humanitarian refugee crisis. UNICEF recently conducted research showing that significant progress has been made in enrolling Syrian children under temporary protection (UTP) in school (UNICEF, 2019c). Nevertheless, findings from a number of data sources show that many Syrian children under temporary protection (UTP) are still not enrolled in school and there are other problems, such as an ageing student population (UNICEF, 2019c). This in turn highlights the importance of further research, including new field-collected data, to deepen the understanding of the prevalence of OOSC among the refugee population, the various problems associated with OOSC and the underlying causes of school dropout in Turkey.
The overall objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of OOSC in Turkey among the refugee population, based on a quantitative and qualitative (mixed methods) research framework. The focus is on barriers that hinder refugee children’s access to and completion of compulsory education in Turkey. These include a large number of often interrelated factors such as poverty, child labor, early and forced marriage, bullying, school quality and access, cultural norms, and language. Cross-cutting themes such as gender are also highlighted. The quantitative data are drawn from existing sources covering the 2016–2017 to 2019–2020 school years (coverage varies by source), while the qualitative data were obtained through a survey conducted specifically for this study in November 2020 and March 2021.
The added value of this study is that it provides the most detailed and comprehensive overview of the OOSC problem among Syrian UTP to date. The quantitative analysis makes full use of the extensive data available on Syrian UTP, including a separate Syrian sample in the 2018 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), while the qualitative analysis includes new data from an extensive data collection process and focuses on the underlying reasons that explain OOSC according to children, their parents and a number of key informants.
A key objective of the study is to provide policy guidance. The refugee situation has posed enormous challenges to Turkish policymakers and has resulted in policy changes and shifts with resulting policy gaps that have potentially far-reaching implications for the education of the refugee population. This report provides an integrated analysis that assesses the effectiveness and applicability of current policies based on the key findings of the mixed methods data analysis, which in turn forms the basis for formulating an updated set of policy recommendations.
