Unlocking limitless potential: refugees in education 

As Chief of the UNHCR’s Education Section, what prompted your interest in supporting children and young people whose lives have been impacted by conflict and crisis?  

This is an area I’ve worked in for 25 years. I was interested in it, partly, because I came from a background of community activism in the UK. Growing up and spending my early adult years on a housing estate that had a lot of social problems, seeing my peer group and friends going through the criminal justice system, being very disadvantaged in education and having a really strong sense that they could contribute so much to the world if they were given opportunities.

From my focus in the UK, I then moved onto doing that kind of work globally. It’s a very core belief; everyone matters, everyone has something to offer and that the world would be a better place if everyone was granted opportunities.  

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What do you love most about your work and what’s one of the toughest parts of your job? 
 

What I love most is just remembering how amazing and resilient people are. I spend a lot of time meeting students, teachers and parents – and people go through terrible, traumatic experiences. They lose everything. They go through all sorts of trauma and yet, you’ll find that teachers are still teaching. Parents are still sending their children to school. Children still want to learn. Communities are still coming together, engaging and playing and not just waiting to be given opportunities, but really working so hard themselves. That is always inspiring.  

The harder thing is the fact that displacement continues to increase, so we’re not dealing with a static problem. You’re constantly trying to find ways to support new groups of people or additional groups of people and doing that in a time when resources have gone down. So actually, there’s more people and less money. As well, there’s so much negativity around refugees within the global discourse that continuing to try and share those messages around refugees being an asset, along with the fact that any of us could become refugees, is incredibly tough.  

Within your time at UNHCR, how have you seen things change when it comes to refugees’ access to education?  

I think there’s been some really positive movement under the Global Compact on Refugees. There’s a real focus on including refugees in international systems.
That has actually had a huge number of successes. So, the majority of countries now will at least allow refugees to use the national curriculum, sit for exams and have the certification that will help them move on to the next piece of that pathway. That’s been really positive. There’s been an increased focus on the whole education pathway, including early childhood, focusing on different post-secondary opportunities and broadening out the options that people have, which will then suit them.  

In the time since I’ve been the Chief of Education, the number of refugees enrolled in education has doubled globally. The number of refugees has also significantly increased, but I think even the percentage of refugees out of school has remained at 50%, almost relatively static. But the fact that it’s still 50%, even though the number of displaced people is so huge, means that we are really making successes.  

How do you see technology transforming access to learning for those forced to flee and wishing to pursue their education? 

There are some really positive aspects to it. We can include refugees in national systems, but they will always have additional support needs even being in those systems. I think that’s where technology can come in. Particularly for something like language, being able to learn host languages, but also maintain that cultural affinity to where they’ve come from and being able to maintain their mother tongue. There are other things like keeping up with the news and keeping in contact with families. That’s really important.  

There have been some really interesting moves around having additional materials available online. For example, if you have a school which has very few resources, you don’t need to wait until you can buy a thousand textbooks. You can access, not just the kind of standard materials you find in a classroom, but a lot of things that refugees don’t get to experience, especially those who are in camps. For instance, trying to learn what a mountain is for your geography class when you’ve never seen a mountain, it brings the world kind of closer in. 

I think there are some specific opportunities for online and distance learning for refugees, especially around post-secondary education – and we do a lot of work on connected higher education. Like, being able to undertake a degree and attending courses and classes online. In fact, I did my Master’s online because I’ve got kids at home and I’m busy. So there are benefits, especially where you have issues around freedom of movement. There are a lot of ways that tech brings educational opportunities to refugees where they are and gives them that additional support. That said, technology cannot solve education by itself, so the focus remains having children being able to go into school, a school which is safe and which is inclusive and where they get the support they need, because it also builds up a different set of social skills and provides social cohesion. It’s more about using technology really mindfully as a tool rather than looking for a quick fix. 
 

If you had to tell the UK public one thing about refugees and education, what would that be?

Refugees want the same things that everybody wants. They want their children to be safe, they want to have a chance for education, they want to get a job and work. They want access to basic healthcare and to be able to engage with where they are. And education is key to all of those things in terms of having the ability to read and write, to navigate a system, to dream and to become economically self-reliant. Refugees don’t want to live on handouts and be dependent on others. It’s not what they want and recognising the value for them and for the global community, including British people who might feel very far away from refugee populations, means giving them the tools to become self-reliant. 
 

If you’re someone based in the UK, who doesn’t have a lot of disposable income, what are some other ways we can help young refugees gain access to education? 

I’d recommend checking in about your understanding of what it means to be a refugee. And understanding who refugees are, like how it happens to people and the kind of support that they need from the international community. There are refugees in every community and recognising maybe that there’s a refugee family in your school who’s struggling and could do with a bit of additional conversation or maybe your kid could be nicer to their kid. Recognising that you’re part of that social creation is really important.  

I think you can be an advocate for education for refugees, even if you’re doing it without financing. The UK government supports UNHCR and refugee-hosting countries to give access to education, so that refugees can become self-reliant. You, as a UK taxpayer, are engaged with that process. What is it that you want the UK government to do to support refugees where they are so they can have better lives? 

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UNHCR works to ensure refugee children and young people can access quality education. You can learn more about UNHCR’s work to build better futures and check out the 2024 Education Report on their website. 

To follow Dr Becky Telford, visit LinkedIn.