Toward inclusive refugee education? Host country teachers, refugee students, and the limits of global policy.

• In Event: Highlighted Session: From afterthought to action: Putting teachers at the heart of the global refugee response

Proposal

The field of education in emergencies has grown over the last twenty years, with increased funding and research focused on issues of education in settings of forced displacement and conflict. Increasingly, this burgeoning field highlights the importance of including refugee young people in national school systems within host countries, rather than creating parallel educational systems for refugees, as was previously the dominant model (Dryden-Peterson, 2022). However, despite increased attention to the education of young people in emergencies, as this paper will emphasize, a disconnect persists between humanitarian commitments regarding refugee education (and, specifically, the emphasis on refugee access to host country schools) and locally implementable policies and practices. Many organizations have articulated the importance of ‘localization’ in humanitarian responses, highlighting the vital role of local actors and agencies (e.g., USAID, 2024) and acknowledging the power imbalances inherent to what has come to be known as the ‘global aid architecture’ of education in emergencies (Buckland, 2011). Nonetheless, while an important reorientation, this framing only begins to engage with the question of how to translate global humanitarian commitments into national, local, and, importantly, classroom-level policies and practices.

To examine the gap between global commitments and the tools necessary to enact them across diverse school settings, the case of Kampala, Uganda, will be introduced as a pertinent case study. Uganda is one of the top refugee-hosting settings globally, with some of the most progressive policies related to refugee educational inclusion in the world (UNHCR & Government of Uganda, 2022); nearly 50% of refugees in Uganda live in the capital city, Kampala (UNHCR, 2024). Nonetheless, despite policies permitting refugees to access national schools in both cities and rural settlements, the basic tools that are typically wielded to transform education policies into practice are not widely used in the case of refugee education. Drawing on thematic analysis of Ugandan curricular materials, documents outlining the national approach to refugee education, and interviews with 23 Ugandan teachers engaged in the daily work of teaching refugee and Ugandan students together, a disconnect is revealed between Uganda’s policy related to inclusive refugee education and the teacher-facing, system-wide approaches needed to enact it. Thus, while progressive policies exist, the daily practices that national teachers must undertake to implement refugee education are absent from the local policy, practice, and training architecture which should enable teachers’ work.

This absence is meaningful because it impacts the wellbeing of young people and the extent to which their teachers are able to support them in school. The case of Uganda specifically sheds light on challenges across refugee-hosting settings; given its national commitment to refugee educational inclusion, we can assume that the disconnect between global commitments and local implementation is yet greater elsewhere, with concerning implications for children and teachers alike. This paper will therefore offer one of the first examinations of the (dis)connections between global humanitarian commitments and their enactment in schools serving refugees, with concerning downstream implications for the educational engagement of refugee children and national teachers alike.

Author

• Celia Reddick, Learning Systems Institute at Florida State University