For children who have experienced forced displacement, access to high-quality, inclusive early childhood education and care (ECEC) can offer crucial benefits, representing a powerful tool to reduce educational inequalities. Yet, ECEC is underexplored in refugee education, and significant barriers remain to ensuring equitable access for children from refugee backgrounds.

A new report by the Hub for Education for Refugees in Europe (HERE) and Refugee Education UK examines existing evidence on ECEC for refugee children in Europe. It provides insights and recommendations for policymakers and practitioners and outlines priorities for future research.

 

The importance of ECEC for refugee children

The foundations for learning are built early in life, with experiences during our earliest years playing an important role in shaping cognitive, social, emotional and physical development.

For children who have experienced forced displacement, high-quality ECEC can be pivotal. It can support school readiness, language acquisition and socio-emotional development, and can reduce gaps in future outcomes between children from refugee backgrounds and their non-refugee peers (Baghdasaryan et al., 2023; Busch et al., 2023; Erdemir, 2022a; Park et al., 2018). High-quality, trauma-informed ECEC provision can also help to mitigate the impact of stress and upheaval that children may have experienced, providing stability and a safe space for learning and play (Ashlee et al., 2023; Jalbout & Bullard, 2021; Park et al., 2018). However, these benefits are not automatic – much depends on the quality and inclusivity of provision.

ECEC can also offer benefits to parents and caregivers, creating opportunities to study or take up employment. ECEC services are often amongst the first that newly arrived families with young children engage with, providing a gateway to wider support networks and services and helping to ease transitions to life in a new context (Ashlee et al., 2023; Gambaro et al., 2021; Vindrola et al., 2023).

 

A growing research field

The report draws on a scoping review of resources in the HERE Knowledge Base, a repository of more than 1,000 academic and non-academic studies on refugee education in Europe published since 2015.

Although research on ECEC for refugee children in Europe has grown in recent years, it remains understudied in comparison to other levels of education (Aleghfeli, 2023; Wihstutz, 2020), with only 37 studies meeting our inclusion criteria.

There are also significant research gaps. Crucially, few studies on ECEC for refugee children seek the perspectives and experiences of young children themselves. Participatory, child-centred studies involving children from refugee backgrounds as active participants are a priority for future research. In addition, displaced children with special educational needs and disabilities are almost entirely absent from existing research on ECEC, reflecting a broader gap in the field of refugee education. The report identifies further gaps and suggests questions and directions for future research.

 

Barriers and challenges

The literature reviewed identified a range of barriers limiting access to high-quality ECEC for forcibly displaced children. These include:

• Policy gaps and limitations, such as eligibility restrictions linked to parents’ immigration or employment status, and the absence of national policy or strategy to ensure refugee children’s access to quality ECEC in many countries (Ashlee et al., 2023; Park et al., 2018; Vandekerckhove & Aarssen, 2020).
• Practical barriers, including the cost of ECEC, a lack of affordable and reliable transport, complex application and enrolment processes, and a lack of spaces in overstretched, underfunded ECEC systems (Park et al., 2018; Scholz, 2021).
• Lack of accessible information, advice and guidance, including on entitlements to and eligibility for ECEC, enrolment processes and support with costs (Ashlee et al., 2023; Davies et al., 2022, 2023).
• Limited training and support on trauma-informed approaches, with ECEC practitioners reporting feeling underprepared to effectively support children who have experienced forced displacement (Tobin, 2020) and one multi-country study describing training and resources on trauma-informed care as “almost universally lacking” (Park et al., 2018, p. 14).
• Disruption due to temporary accommodation and dispersal policies, including accommodation of families in areas with limited ECEC provision (Ashlee et al., 2023; Davies et al., 2022; Donnelly, 2019).

 

Recommendations for policy and practice

The report and accompanying policy brief set out recommendations for policymakers and practitioners. These include:

• Ensure refugee children are visible in ECEC policy: Adopt national strategies to improve equitable access to high-quality ECEC for refugee children, and improve the collection of disaggregated data to better understand current levels of enrolment and inclusion (Park et al., 2018; Vandekerckhove & Aarssen, 2020; Vindrola et al., 2023).
• Ease application processes and remove eligibility restrictions: Remove eligibility barriers, including those linked to parents’ employment or immigration status. Simplify enrolment and application processes and ensure these are available in a range of languages and formats (Ashlee et al., 2023; Davies et al., 2022).
• Invest in training for ECEC practitioners: Ensure provision of ongoing training and support, including on trauma-informed care, culturally and linguistically inclusive pedagogies and working with second language learners (Jalbout & Bullard, 2021; Silva et al., 2020; Tobin, 2020). This should include support for staff to understand, identify and respond to the effects of trauma on children’s development (Jalbout & Bullard, 2021).
• Hire educators from refugee communities: Promote recruitment of practitioners from refugee backgrounds and remove obstacles to their full participation in the ECEC workforce (Park et al., 2018; Tobin, 2020; Vindrola et al., 2023).
• Support and celebrate multilingualism: Encourage children to learn and maintain home languages while supporting acquisition of host country languages, and create language-rich environments within ECEC settings (Aluf & Tkachenko, 2024; Erdemir, 2022b; Ragnarsdóttir, 2021).
• Strengthen collaboration with refugee parents and caregivers: Support family engagement through culturally sensitive communication, openness to different expectations of and approaches to ECEC, proactive outreach, trust building and support for translation where needed (Kimathi, 2023; Lund, 2024; Sadownik & Ndijuye, 2024; Tobin, 2020).

 

Foundations for lifelong learning

There is growing recognition of the importance of high-quality, inclusive and accessible ECEC for refugee children. It can have immediate and long-term benefits, for children and for their families, parents and caregivers. To realise this transformative potential, ECEC must be inclusive, culturally and linguistically sensitive and tailored to the needs of each child. Yet, numerous practical and policy-related barriers continue to limit access to quality ECEC for forcibly displaced children. These barriers result in missed opportunities to reduce educational inequities, to promote inclusion and to support refugee children to thrive, in education and beyond.

 

Read the report

Read the policy brief

 

 

About the HERE Knowledge Base

The HERE Knowledge Base includes hundreds of academic and non-academic resources on refugee education from across Europe. The knowledge base is fully searchable, and links are provided to source materials.

 

Note on contributor

Alice Robinson wrote this blog while working as Research Manager at Refugee Education UK (REUK), a charity working towards a world where all young refugees can access education, thrive in education and use that education to create a hopeful, brighter future. As Research Manager, Alice oversaw REUK’s research on refugee education, in the UK and internationally.

 

Suggested citation

References

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