Lebanon’s Education Ministry should extend the December 4, 2021, school registration deadline for Syrian children and end policies that are blocking Syrian refugee children’s access to education, Human Rights Watch said on Friday.
Thousands of Syrian refugee children have been out of school, blocked by policies that require certified educational records, legal residency in Lebanon, and other official documents that many Syrians cannot obtain.
HRW said in a statement that “tardy Education Ministry decisions” mean that many Syrian children may be unable to register by December 4.
Syrian children are not automatically enrolled in school each year. Each fall, humanitarian groups must wait for the ministry’s official guidance in a question and answer document, which this year only came on November 29, before they can reach out to and support Syrian communities to enroll their children.
Most Syrian children must also wait to register until the ministry publishes a list of schools that will run second-shift classes for these children. The list was disseminated on November 30.
“There is no excuse for policies that block Syrian children from going to school and leave them with nowhere to turn for a better future,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch.
“The education minister has inherited petty, discriminatory rules that are still undermining education for refugee children a decade after the Syria conflict began, and he should end them.”
Lebanon hosts 660,000 school-age Syrian refugee children, but 30 percent – 200,000 – have never been to school, a 2021 UN assessment found, and almost 60 percent were not enrolled in school in recent years.
Registration numbers this year have been very low, according to humanitarian groups. Since 2019, when schools were closed for lengthy periods in response to widespread anti-corruption protests and the Covid-19 pandemic, even Syrian children who were enrolled received little to no distance learning.
The majority of Syrian students attend second-shift classes at public schools, which have not yet opened. Regular classes at public schools opened on October 11, after the ministry reached a temporary agreement with teachers who had threatened to strike over low wages due to Lebanon’s financial crisis. Second-shift teachers, who work on short-term contracts, have also threatened to strike over unpaid and low wages.
Syrian children seeking to attend regular classes must wait until after Lebanese children are enrolled for unfilled spaces. Fewer spaces are available because about 54,000 Lebanese students transferred from private to public schools during the 2020-21 school year as the economic situation in the country has crumbled.
At least 90 percent of Syrian refugees are now living below Lebanon’s extreme poverty line, up from 55 percent in 2019.
HRW said the Education Ministry requires Syrian children to have legal residency to enroll in secondary school and to take the national Brevet examinations after nine years of primary education and the Baccalaureate examination at the end of secondary school. Fewer than 16 percent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon have legal residency, according to the 2021 UN assessment. Most Syrians in Lebanon must meet onerous requirements to obtain residency, including a US$200 annual fee.
About 40,000 Syrian students in Lebanon have attended non-formal education programs run by humanitarian groups, but in prior years the Education Ministry restricted children from transitioning to formal education unless it had certified their non-formal program.