With its Global Education Strategy of 2012, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) embraced a policy shift that promotes the inclusion of refugee children into the national education systems of countries of first asylum. Educational inclusion is expected to develop refugee children’s human capital and to reinforce harmonious ties to the host society even when there exists no legal pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. The project Learning the Language of Belonging: Barriers to Inclusion in Refugee Education aimed to better understand the assumed relation between educational inclusion and social inclusion by examining a specific policy, that of ‘adaptation classes’, in Turkey. This website contains information on work done as part of the project.

If educational inclusion is to go beyond granting access to schools, we need to advance the global discussion on how schooling can do more than re-placing refugee children at the margins of the host society.