Abstract
It has been discussed time and time again how considerable COVID-19 impacted education and that the education of “Generation Lockdown” has suffered immensely. Likewise, it has been lamented that refugees and stateless persons have been excluded from response policies that were often announced in languages not even accessible to them. However, it is the intersection of the two fields that has earned little scrutiny from the public. This chapter takes a closer look at the problems encountered in the education of child refugees in Europe. It aims to illustrate the difficulties with the protection of child refugees that preceded the COVID-19 crisis and demonstrates how the pandemic has exacerbated the old challenges and added new ones. A brief analysis of how four EU member states (Germany, Greece, Sweden and Croatia) adjusted their education systems in crisis responses, investigates, firstly, the attention given to child refugees by policymakers and, secondly, the implications different crises have on children’s education attainment. This chapter concludes that in order to provide equal access and opportunity in education, refugee children need to be an active point of consideration in future policymaking as well as in any crisis response.
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Notes
- 1.
Although not a legal definition, for the purpose of this chapter, I echo Kollender and Nimer’s (2020, 8) definition of the term refugee as “all people who for various reasons were forced to flee their country of origin and cannot return safely.” Additionally, I define children as all those under the legal age of 18 years.
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Saischek, A. (2022). Falling Through the Cracks: Challenges to the Education of Refugee Children During COVID-19. In: Hosli, M.O., Blessing, A., Iacovidou, I. (eds) The Global, Regional and Local Politics of Institutional Responses to COVID-19. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09913-7_7
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