Refugee Education: Aligning Access, Learning & Opportunity

Access, learning, and opportunity are usually conceptualized in a sequential and linear way: with access to school comes learning and with learning comes opportunity. But for most refugee students-and for most marginalized students globally-this model simply does not hold. In settings where students’ mobility and their social, economic, and political rights have massive restrictions, access to school does not translate into learning, and learning does not translate into opportunities. Creating education that enables refugee young people to feel a sense of belonging and prepares them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures requires us to address these misalignments, which are rooted across the ecosystem, from macrolevel geopolitical arrangements to micro-level interactions in classrooms. I pose three questions as central in understanding these misalignments: Who is allowed to be where and for how long? Who is responsible for refugee education? And who can feel a sense of belonging? Answering these questions informs how we might work, through policy and practice, toward alignment.