Education is a crucial part of the integration of refugees into the countries where they took shelter and helps prevent children from spending years without a proper education. Promoting Integration of Syrian Kids into Turkish Education System (PIKTES), a joint European Union-Turkey project, seeks to address this problem.
Though it primarily focuses on children from Turkey’s largest refugee population, Syrians, it encompasses refugee children from other countries as well and recently, authorities decided to include Turkish students in the program’s branch that involves education material aid.
The project’s details were explained by Ministry of National Education officials at the meeting of a parliamentary subcommittee on human rights and migration this week. Officials said the project had a budget of some 400 million euros ($454.5 million) and served 750,000 students in 26 provinces with a higher concentration of refugees. Along with Syrians, Afghan, Somali, Iraqi, Yemeni and Palestinian students benefit from the project.
Officials say the number of students, however, has been on the decline for some time, especially those between the ages of 5 and 17. They link it to mass returns to Syria by refugees. Though the conflict is still underway in Turkey's southern neighbor, war-torn Syria’s northern parts are relatively safe, as they were liberated from terrorist groups with the support of Turkey and are relatively protected from the attacks of the Assad regime forces.
Istanbul is among the provinces with the highest number of students from refugee families, ahead of Şanlıurfa, Gaziantep, Hatay and Kilis, Turkish provinces stretching across the Syrian-Turkish border. As part of the project, 200 new prefabricated kindergartens will be built across Turkey in the near future.
Besides the standard curriculum, refugee children are provided with Turkish language classes and so far, some 550,000 students have learned Turkish through PIKTES. Another 390,000 students benefited from psychiatric counseling services to help them overcome the trauma of war and displacement in their home countries.
Officials say Turkey’s imam-hatip schools provide a particular advantage for the education of Syrian female students. Schools with a curriculum that includes Arabic classes were crucial in keeping Syrian girls in education and preventing early marriages, prevalent among some refugee families from that country. More than 100,000 refugee children are enrolled at imam-hatip schools and the majority of them are girls.
