Only six out of every 10 Syrian refugee children at the age of compulsory education can actually access education in Turkey, the Ministry of National Education (MEB) said.
Turkish Minister of National Education İsmet Yılmaz was asked to respond to a parliamentary question about the situation of Syrian students in Turkey.
Referring to the Directorate General of Migration Management, Yılmaz stated that there were 14,237 Syrian refugees in Turkey in 2012, while this figure increased to 3,485,644 Syrians living in Turkey by January 25, 2018.
According to information given by Yılmaz, 976,200 children of this population are at the age where they are expected to receive compulsory education as of September 2017. Yet, only 603,756 children were able to access education by February 5, 2018, a figured that includes distance education at the elementary and high school levels and MEB’s education centers giving Turkish lessons.
These figures indicate that four out of every 10 Syrian children do not go to school in Turkey. This proportion was one-tenth for Turkish children, according to an official report prepared by the MEB.
Approximately half of the Syrian students receive education in ministerial schools.
%6 OF SYRIAN CHILDREN IN ISLAMIC IMAM HATIP SCHOOLS
There are more than one million Syrian refugee children between the ages of 5-18 in Turkey.
Sharing information regarding the participation of Syrians in Islamic imam hatip schools, İsmet Yılmaz noted that 36,385 Syrian refugees in total receive education in imam hatip schools. 13,664 of these refugees are in imam hatip high schools, while 22,721 refugees attend imam hatip middle schools.
This corresponds to 6% of the total number of Syrian refugees receiving education in Turkey.
While non-Syrian refugees have almost no access to education, thousands of Syrian children fall into the hands of the schools controlled by Free Syrian Army (FSA) and other jihadist groups. There are 42 thousand non-Syrian immigrants and refugee school-age children in Turkey.
UNICEF data in 2017 indicated that there are a total of 642,867 registered Syrian refugees in Turkey. 34% of Syrian refugees live in camps, and 66% of them are out of the camps. 53% (341,362) of these registered refugees are children. In addition to these, it is assumed that there are approximately 150,000 unregistered Syrian citizens living in Turkey.
According to a UN report published in 2017, 20% of school-aged children in the camps and 74% of child refugees living outside the camps do not go to school.
