Politics of refugee education: educational administration of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey

ABSTRACT

The main contention of this paper is that the interrelationship between ideology and policy shapes both the overall organisation of refugee education and the operational practices and procedures of staff working to provide education for refugees. Accordingly, this paper tries to answer how the education dimension of the Syrian refugee crisis is managed by the central education authorities in Turkey by assessing the political dynamics and milieu regarding the education of refugees. Building on a document analysis and interviews, this article traces educational administration of Syrian children with a focus on the political dynamics at play affecting the status quo in national education agenda in Turkey. While the impact of the refugee crisis on the greater national education agenda is revealed, the trade-offs involved in adopting certain governance strategies including decentralisation and recentralization is explored.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee education
• educational administration
• Syrian crisis
• policy making
• de/recentralization in education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Aslihan Tezel McCarthy completed their PhD in 2016 at Middle East Technical University in Turkey in the field of sociology. She currently works for RET International.

Notes

1. The law on the duties and organisation on the Ministry of National Education is available at http://mevzuat.meb.gov.tr/html/73.html. It was abrogated by the article 44 of the statutory decree the organisation and the mission of MoNE on 14.09.2011 available at http://mevzuat.meb.gov.tr/html/mebtesvegorevkhk_1/KHK.pdf

2. MoNE Press Release, 31 November 2012, translated into English from Turkish Web Site available at http://www.meb.gov.tr/haberler/2012/03102012.pdf, accessed 04.04.2012

3. The circular envisaged that ‘foreigner identification document’ given by the respective institution is required for the registration of school age foreigners and requesting adults, who came to Turkey as part of a mass influx, to the TECs or to all types and levels of education institutions under MoNE (except higher education institutions) and they shall be registered by the provincial commissions to the appropriate education institutions under MoNE or TECs through student placement and transfer commissions.

4. Press Release to Reuters published in ‘No School for 400,000 Syrian Refugee Children in Turkey – Official,’ Reuters, October 2, 2015, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/10/02/uk-mideast-crisis-turkey-education-idUKKCN0RW1WK20151002 accessed 15.02 2016

5. Before the crisis, while the student number per classroom was 21,6 in OECD average, this number was 31 for Turkey. Besides this number varies to a great extend regionally (Kılıç and Tanman 2009).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the TUBITAK [grant number 2214-A].