Education for Ukrainian refugees

Romanian education minister says his country has a duty to provide Ukrainian refugee children with access to education.

Roxana Vasile, 28.03.2022, 14:00

It’s
been a month since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and refugees are
continuing to arrive in Romania. More than half a million have so far
crossed the border into Romania, being received with solidarity and
generosity by their Romanian neighbours. The government in Bucharest
said it can provide accommodation to 400,000 refugees, but of the
many who have crossed into Romania, few have stayed, and fewer still,
only a few thousand, have asked for some form of protection from the
Romanian state.

According
to education minister Sorin Cîmpeanu, 34,000 of the almost 79,000
refugees currently in Romania are children, and 24,000 of them are of
school age. 1,140 of these children have applied to study under the
Romanian curriculum, most of them probably belonging to ethnic
Romanian communities in Ukraine, a community which is the second
largest in that country after the ethnic Russian community. The
majority of Ukrainian children now taking refuge in Romania wish,
however, to study under the Ukrainian curriculum, and this, says
minister Cîmpeanu, requires first and foremost logistical support
from Romanian schools, namely classroom space and technical
equipment. Sorin Cîmpeanu:

Romanian
schools have stocks of tablets that have not been distributed because
additional stocks were purchased. These surplus tablets will be
distributed among Ukrainian children, without Romanian children
having to go without.

The
government is also planning to permit
an exemption from
the Romanian education law for Ukrainian
children in their final year of secondary
school to allow them to
continue their high school studies in Romania even if
they
do not speak Romanian. Under current legislation, pupils
can only register to high school if they pass the so-called national
evaluation, which is made up of exams in mathematics and the Romanian
language.

This
week, the authorities in Bucharest are
having talks
with
the visiting European Commissioner for
Jobs
and Social Rights Nikolas Schmidt about
the integration of Ukrainian children into the education system. (CM)