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The significant increase in refugees in Europe and worldwide during 2015 challenges the paradigm of refugee education. For many decades, ‘refugee education’ has been primarily associated with the education of refugees in countries far-away as the majority of the world’s displaced persons and refugees are hosted by countries in the Global South. However, the recent European ‘refugee crisis’, that is, the large influx of refugees and migrants in Europe, has definitely turned refugee education into a European issue. As refugee students from all over the world enter European classrooms, policy makers, educators and researchers need to rethink refugee education ‘at home’ in order to ensure quality and equity. As many refugees in Europe are here to stay, the challenge is how education can contribute to their inclusion in school as well as their integration into the host society. There is a great need for rethinking the education of refugees resettling in Europe and their inclusion in national school systems. How can universal principles of quality and equity for all students be implemented in national education policies, schools and classroom practice? The current challenges are complex and call for an interdisciplinary approach. Findings and perspectives from refugee education research as well as comparative and international education research can advance our understanding of these issues. This chapter argues for a holistic, whole-school approach to refugee education, which includes education policy, school structures, classroom practice, curricula, pedagogy and teaching materials, as well as cultural awareness and refugee competence.

Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees of any nation globally, and the influx of Syrian refugees has placed massive strain on the Turkish education system. In response, the Promoting Integration of Syrian Children to the Turkish Education System (PICTES) program was implemented to help strengthen the Turkish public-school system and increase education access for Syrian refugee students. This chapter uses Bacchi’s (2009) method of policy analysis to look deeply at the underlying assumptions in the PICTES program. This analysis reveals that while the PICTES program has made great strides toward helping refugee students gain more long-term and sustainable access to education, it reflects cultural deficit thinking and focuses more on what refugees’ lack and need than on what they already have. The author argues that the PICTES program needs to be revised to change the current deficit approach and emphasize recognizing and leveraging refugees’ cultural wealth.

The focus of this paper is to compare access to higher education by Syrian refugees in Jordan and Germany. Background of the Syrian refugee crisis and its scope are provided before delving into a description of the university-age population among Syrian refugees in both countries. The nature of access to higher education in both countries is first examined before conducting a comparative analysis of the two. Implications and recommendations for policy and practice are provided.

Recent refugee integration policy agendas include education on the lists, despite many other issues to address. Higher education can also be an instrument to prevent a generation of a war-stricken nation from becoming “lost” for not only for Syria but also Europe. Following the drastic inflow of (mostly young) refugees, Belgian higher education institutions started to work on fresh strategies and initiatives to embrace refugees in their university and colleges. Yet, the number of Syrian refugees at the Belgian universities does not exceed 400, while the estimated eligible young people are above 1,500. In order to increase the participation in higher education, national authorities and higher education institutions should re-work on flexible but efficient procedures for the recognition of degrees and prior gained qualifications. Moreover, all individual efforts by the colleges and the universities can be empowered by a collaborative network among all Belgian higher education institutes, governmental offices and the non-governmental organizations. Surmounting the lack of central coordination and developing a national action plan is needed. Short-term actions are immediately required to battle against the contemporary challenges with tertiary education access of the refugees; however, the need for actions that aim at long-reaching sustainability is eminent to secure refugees’ integration into their host communities.

Today, there are 16.1 million refugees worldwide under the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ mandate. Among the refugee population, half of them are children and six million are of primary and secondary school-going age. The number of displaced people around the world has reached unprecedented levels in the recent years since the Syrian crisis escalated. Refugees, because of language and other barriers, face a particularly difficult challenge in attaining even a basic education. Keeping the barriers and challenges in mind, education is now seeking the help of technology to create new and sometimes unexpected opportunities for pathways to education for refugees. This chapter will highlight the contribution of University of the People (https://www.uopeople.edu), a tuition-free, non-profit, American accredited, online university that has been working with refugees to enable access to higher education for those living in refugee camps and other displaced people around the world.

Refugee students’¹ education is disrupted by multiple spatial and temporal transitions – no matter where they come from, where they go, and what cause their forced migration. The first major disruption occurs with their flight from origin countries due to security or other reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic led to another dramatic disruption with a heightened risk of weakening hard-earned progress. This chapter examines an example of post-migration education opportunities for urban refugee students across two monolingual contexts at two critical junctures from their arrival in the destination countries to the COVID-19 outbreak. It discusses the readiness and responsiveness of Turkish and German education systems by examining the instances and consequences of disruption in refugee students’ education in İstanbul and Hamburg. A multiple case study design with critical policy analysis (CPA) was used. In addition to the available national statistics, empirical data drew on semi-structured in-depth interviews with refugee students and teachers. The background section maps out the trajectory of refugee education with a synthesis of the formal educational policies in Turkey and Germany toward the inclusion of refugee students into public schools. The findings first elaborate on the readiness of the Turkish and German contexts and a scoping review of the literature on the major issues in both settings. The second part explores the responsiveness of both education systems to refugee children’s education during the COVID-19 pandemic in both cases, namely, in İstanbul and Hamburg.

In this discussion essay, characteristics of the provision of formal and non-formal education for refugee children in Greece will be explored through a comparative approach. The comparison reveals aspects of the social environments in the lives of refugee children. These will be examined through the lens of Uri Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1986) ecological systems theory as a means to understand the context of refugee children’s lives and also propose a more holistic approach to refugee education.

Against the danger of a lost generation of Syrian children, both Turkish state and civil society organizations (CSO) have developed strategies to bridge the education gap of Syrian children. In that context, this chapter explores the relationship between the Turkish state and civil society in education provision for non-camp Syrian refugees between 2011 and 2016. Presenting civil society as a theoretical framework in refugee education, this study aims to contribute to the debates on education in an era of mass displacement on an institutional level. The role of civil society against the state in education for Syrian refugees is put under scrutiny with an emphasis on the repercussions of the unprecedented number of non-citizen students for state-centered, secular, and monocultural visions of education. In doing so, this study uses policy documents between 2011 and 2016 circulated by Ministry of National Education and data gathered from interviews conducted with representatives of state and CSOs.

Since the 1970s, Malawi has been a host to asylum seekers fleeing from liberation and civil wars in Mozambique, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and the Zaire/Democratic Republic of the Congo (Makhema, 2009). As a signatory to international legal instruments governing refugees and asylum seekers, Malawi, whose constitution advocates for education rights for all, is obligated to host the refugees and provide for their needs such as pre-primary, primary, secondary and higher education, health, and security.

In this chapter, the authors discuss the history of refugee flows into Malawi and refugee education policy within the national education policies in Malawi. In particular, the authors argue that refugees are part of Malawi’s social and demographic reality and their education needs and rights should be factored into the country’s higher education policy and annual national budgets. The authors further make proposals for extending equitable higher education access to accommodate refugee applicants.

The authors conclude by recommending that, in order for Malawi to live by its commitments to serve all humanity without segregation, it should reserve a quota for refugees in public universities, or at least welcoming refugee applicants on local fees terms.

Using conceptions of transnationalism to (re)evaluate the field of comparative and international education (CIE), this chapter analyzes educational programming and policy for migrant refugee youth at the margins and borderlands of the nation-state system. Drawing from newspaper articles about displaced youth on Kenya’s eastern border and the southwestern U.S. border, this chapter focuses on comparative and international education’s potential influence on programming and policies in borderland regions. Both populations present the need for targeted educational programming within and outside of formal education systems and urgency for research linked with practice. We argue that CIE scholars can fill a critical, activist purpose to draw attention to educational access and curricular content in educational projects at the borders of the nation-state system, to investigate programming, and to work with practitioners and policy makers to address the needs of youth on the physical and figurative margins of education.