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 were placed in Fót by virtue of a ‘temporary placement decision’, the statement of intent to lodge an asylum application in Hungary must had been submitted in one of the designated embassies. In practice, this could be done by the legal guardian of the UaSC; besides the designated embassies, the submission could also be made in Subotica (Szabadka), closer to Hungary than Belgrade (see Embassy Procedure). This problem no longer persists, since UaSC can now exempted from the 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 several 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, as well as in 2024, 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. In 2024, one UaSC placed in Fót attended school. In September 2025, thanks to the work of Menedék Association, all children of compulsory school age staying in Fót were enrolled in a public educational institution. They were mainly Ukrainians beneficiaries of temporary protection, but there were also two asylum seekers among them.[2]
JRS and Menedék Association help those placed in Fót with their school studies.
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, 2023 or 2024. The HHC is aware of one asylum seeking family (since February 2025), whose children do not attend any school.
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. AssociationIn 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, 2023 nor in 2024. In 2025, Menedék Association visited Balassagyarmant on some occasions. One of their clients attended their Hungarian conversation group in Budapest, for which he applied for a travel discount under Section 24 of the Asylum Decree, with the help of Menedék. This client is also learning Hungarian with the help of a volunteer of Menedék Association.[3]
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.[4]
[1] Section 45(3) Act CXC of 2011 on public education.
[2] Information received from the Menedék Association on 1 February 2026.
[3] Information received from the Menedék Association on 1 February 2026.
[4] For more information, see AIDA, Country Report : Hungary – Annex on Temporary Protection, 2023 update, available here, p. 57.