One February morning in 2014, I found myself sitting with a group of Syrian refugee community members in one of Lebanon’s hundreds of informal refugee settlements. With a noticeable number of school-aged children joining in on our discussion, rather than attending classes, we talked about education. The community was prioritizing needs such as latrines, water and livelihoods first, which was understandable considering their vulnerable living conditions.

The children in this community are part of the 75% of over 500,000 school-aged Syrian refugee children not accessing formal education in Lebanon. Since the start of the Syrian Civil War in March 2011, almost two million refugees have sought safety in this neighbouring country. The Lebanese government, humanitarian actors, and host communities have made continued efforts to manage the immense impact the crisis has had on the country’s infrastructure and public services including education. With the crisis entering its fifth year, the delicate discussion of a longer-term response continues. There is a risk of an entire Syrian generation being left uneducated, which is well understood by stakeholders, but planning for the delivery of education to the predicted 655,000 school-aged Syrian children in Lebanon by the end of 2015 is not a humble effort.

Even with efforts from the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE), international donors and UN agencies to make formal education spaces available through double shift classes, the overwhelming majority of Syrian households are not enrolling their children in school. Contributing factors to low registration rates are numerous, intertwining and complex, including long gaps in education due to the war, the absence of subsidised transportation, household income needs, and highly transient communities.

Concern Worldwide established basic literacy and numeracy (BLN) and homework support programmes. Both were designed to provide children with the key skills expected of them to enter into and be successful within Lebanese public schools.

Recognizing these challenges, national and international organizations have turned to non-formal education (NFE) as a means to respond to the growing education needs of Syrian refugee children. However, no two programmes are alike, and curricula and learning expectations vary greatly depending on each organization’s approach. How the success of NFE programmes is measured is still largely discussed between humanitarian actors; however without consistency between programmes, standard indicators for achievement are a challenge to establish. There are also concerns by some that NFE is contributing to the lack of formal school registrations by offering additional benefits that the public schools cannot support, like refreshments or transportation subsidies, which draw more interest from households than over formal schooling.

When Concern Worldwide launched its NFE programme in north Lebanon in 2014, it aimed to strike a delicate balance between the need to respond to the growing gaps in children’s education, while trying to avoid a long-term dependency on its services. Field assessments revealed noticeable gaps in literacy competencies for children in school as well as those who were out of school. Concern therefore established basic literacy and numeracy (BLN) and homework support programmes. Both were designed to provide children with the key skills expected of them to enter into and be successful within Lebanese public schools. The aim is to support the transition to formal education for those children not registered, and improve retention rates for those who were. To mitigate access issues, BLN classes are held in temporary learning spaces established within the informal refugee settlements, and homework support is held within municipality, association, and public school buildings. The programme has had a strong impact on building children’s core learning competencies, even when facing challenges which include households relocating mid-course, unsuccessful negotiations for free land for learning spaces, evictions of settlements by the local authorities, poor weather conditions and inconsistent attendance by students.  For the 4,400 children, both Syrian and Lebanese, who were reached with Concern’s NFE programme, the classes provided a window of educational opportunity as part of a closely monitored programme.

NFE programmes have addressed some of the immediate education needs, but they cannot act as the sole means to support pathways to formal education. Factors such as consistently shifting populations, weak social cohesion between host and refugee communities, household income priorities, reports of corporal punishment, and lack of confidence by households in actual learning outcomes, are external considerations which cannot be resolved by one organization or sector alone. Only after the community referenced above received support in sanitation, was the BLN programme then brought to the site. The opening day of classes saw children up to 14 years old learning to read and write their own names for the first time in their lives. The children have now taken the skills learned and used them to enrol in a MEHE accelerated learning programme, bringing them one step closer to enrolling in formal public schools in Lebanon.

Sarah Lee is a Canada-born aid worker who has been actively involved in the development and humanitarian sector for eight years. Sarah has carried out fieldwork in Iraq, India, Liberia, Vietnam, Ghana and, most recently, in Lebanon. For the past three years, her work has been focused on the Syrian crisis response including leading the development of a non-formal education program for Concern Worldwide in northern Lebanon.