Author
The Public Education Act provides for compulsory education (kindergarten or school) for asylum seeking and refugee children under the age of 16 staying or residing in Hungary. Children have access to kindergarten and school education under the same conditions as Hungarian children. Schooling is only compulsory until the age of 16.[1]
Refugee children are often not enrolled in normal classes with Hungarian pupils but placed in special preparatory classes. Integration with Hungarian children therefore remains limited (see below the account of Menedék Association). They can move from these special classes into normal classes once their level of Hungarian is sufficient. However, there are only a few institutions which accept such children and are able to provide appropriate programmes according to their specific needs, education level and language knowledge. According to the experience of the Menedék Association, many local schools are reluctant to receive foreign children as:
- they lack the necessary capacity and expertise to provide additional tutoring to asylum-seeking children; and
- Hungarian families would voice their adversarial feelings towards the reception of asylum-seeking children.
This is a clear sign of intolerance of the Hungarian society in general. In some other cases, the local school only accepts asylum seeking children in segregated classes but without a meaningful pedagogical programme and only for 2 hours a day, which is significantly less than the 5-7 hours per day that Hungarian pupils spend in school.
The HHC is also aware of positive examples of schools accepting asylum-seeking children in the last years, including in 2021 and 2022, while there is no data for 2023. However, regarding the administration of official documents, some problems were reported in the last years, although they were solved with the help of the HHC’s legal officer who explained the legal background of such children to the headmaster of that particular school. The Menedék Association also reported administrative barriers due to the lack of certificates providing for the attendance of primary school (8 grades) in the country of origin. Moreover, if the asylum-seeking child has special needs, they rarely have access to special education because of language barriers.
In 2021 already, due to the Embassy procedure, enrolment of unaccompanied and separated children was further delayed by 2-3 months since children are eligible for education only once they are registered as asylum seekers. Even though they are placed in Fót by virtue of a ‘temporary placement decision’, the statement of intent to lodge an asylum application in Hungary must be submitted in one of the designated embassies. In practice, this can be done by the legal guardian of the UaSC; besides the designated embassies, the submission can also be made in Subotica (Szabadka), closer to Hungary than Belgrade (see Embassy Procedure).
UaSCs in Fót attend elementary and secondary school in Budapest, because the local elementary school is not willing to accept these children. Children in the Károlyi István Children’s Home find it hard to enrol in formal education for a number of reasons, such as the delays in providing them with documents (such as an ID card) and the lack of available capacity in the few schools that accept them. Children therefore need the support of NGOs so that they can successfully fulfil the obligations imposed by the school. In the last few years, the Menedék Association in cooperation with the legal guardians provided them the necessary help in this regard.
Thus, in 2023, UaSCs still had significant difficulties in enrolling into schools. Firstly, the submission of the letter of intent at the Embassy in Belgrade delayed their already difficult enrolments by an extra few weeks. Secondly, access to local primary school has not been resolved. Access to education could be ensured through many individual solutions, not at the system level. According to Menedék association, in 2023, three children with temporary protection status placed in Fót attended school.
Upon closure of the transit zones in May 2020, children who were placed with their families in Vámosszabadi enrolled in a local school in Győr, even though education was not integrated, that is asylum seeking children were in separated classes from local children. According to the Menedék Association, in the first half of 2021, a good relationship was established between two local schools and the reception facility. The educational district was cooperative in providing children in Vámosszabadi with community education. Even in the case of a child who did not have permission to stay longer than 3 months and as such, was not officially eligible for formal education, the school accepted to enrol them in school. In addition, there is an educational institution run by retired teachers in Győr. Children could attend preparatory classes in the mornings and afternoons and had classes together with other children two-three times a week. During the remaining two days of the week, social workers assisted the children with studying in the reception facility, with the aim of preparing them for the school year starting in September. This type of training schedule lasted until refugee children arrived in Vámosszabadi in 2021.[2] ) For more details, see Differential treatment of specific nationalities in reception). There was no asylum seeker accommodated in Vámosszabadi in 2022 or in 2023.
In Balassagyarmat, there has been no arrangement made with local schools. There is a school operating on the premises of the community shelter, where resident children can be enrolled. In 2021, two asylum seeking children were successfully enrolled, while there is no data which indicates that such enrolments happened in 2022 and 2023.
Education opportunities and vocational training for adults is only offered once they have a protection status under the same conditions as Hungarian citizens. In practice, asylum seekers can sometimes attend Hungarian language classes offered by NGOs free of charge. As opposed to 2019 and 2020, when the Menedék Association with the help of volunteers provided Hungarian language classes to the residents in Vámosszabadi, as well as in Győr, in 2021 they held programmes for different age groups and familiarised them with the Hungarian alphabet and numbers (the latter exclusively for children). In Balassagyarmat there has been no Hungarian language class provided in the last years to asylum seekers. Menedék Association did not visit Balassagyarmat or Vámosszabadi in 2022 or in 2023.
There are no accelerated education programs for out-of-school youth. There is no scholarship program that specifically supports foreigners living in Hungary or those granted international protection, only in the case of persons with temporary protection, there is the “Students at risk” program as a sub-program of the Stipendium Hungaricum scholarship program. There are no early childhood education and care opportunities.
[1] Section 45(3) Act CXC of 2011 on public education.
[2] Note that refugee children rescued by the Hungarian Defence Forces were not entitled to access education, since they did not fall under asylum procedure during their stay in the reception facilities).