350,000 school-aged Syrian children in Turkey, just half receiving education

Turkey is struggling to educate 350,000 Syrian refugee children, with only around half of all refugee children receiving schooling The number of school-aged children out of the 1.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey is now more than 350,000, new figures have shown, demonstrating the size of Turkey's ongoing refugee burden.

However, only around 140,000 of these children are able to receive an education, with the remaining 200,000 unable to enroll in school. Syrian refugee teachers have been instructing the 140,000, who are being provided education, according to the Syrian national curriculum.

As of September, Turkey had received only 25 percent of the funding it requested as part of the 2014 Syria Regional Refugee Response Plan (RRP6). RRP6, coordinated by the United Nations, brought together more than 155 donors to help Syrian refugees and the local communities hosting them in Turkey, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

However, the hundreds of thousands of school-aged refugees herald the potential humanitarian impacts of the absence of a viable solution to the Syrian crisis, which shows no signs of slowing.

Of those Syrian citizens who are under temporary protection, 250,000 are living in camps set up by Turkey’s disaster agency, the Disaster and Emergency Management Directorate (AFAD). In those camps, formal education is given for children from pre-school age to Grade 12.

Among them, 7,500 are pre-school age, 35,000 are attending primary school, 20,000 are in middle school and 10,000 are enrolled in high school.

The Education Ministry has been coordinating with both AFAD and the Interior Ministry's Directorate General for Migration Management in all of its planning and activities...