Turkey has experienced the most dramatic mass influx of refugees from Syria since 2012. Amongst the consequences of this phenomenon, public schools and their education staff have faced many new challenges. Turkish public schools, where Syrian refugees are now enrolling in greater numbers, are facing significant pressure and teachers and principals are not sufficiently equipped to deal with students who have been out of school for an extended period and do not speak Turkish. As of September 2016, more than 3 million refugees were registered in Turkey, of whom 2.7 million were from Syria. 50% of the refugees were school age children (Immigration Report Turkey, 2016). Moreover, according to the latest announcement by the Turkish Minister of National Education, there are 169,010 Syrian students enrolled in schools and 294,112 in Temporary Education Centers (TECs). Currently, the so-called “Syrian Schools” in Turkey work in shifts, whereby the mainstream morning shift, implementing the Turkish National Curriculum, has mixed classes of Turkish and Syrian children and the afternoon shifts serve as TECs, including only Syrian students of different ages. TECs provide an adapted Syrian curriculum in Arabic and a 15-hour Turkish language course per week. This paper describes part of a larger research studying different aspects of Syrian refugee education in Turkey. In this chapter, we present three facets of the current challenges, relating to policy, leadership and praxis, as perceived by school principals and teachers working in "Syrian Schools" in Ankara. In doing so, we seek to explore and compare the experiences, challenges and coping strategies of these educators in the “Syrian Schools”. Qualitative data elicited from semi-structured interviews with the studied school principals and teachers is currently undergoing qualitative content-analysis (Patton, 2002). Purposive sampling was utilized to select the schools. In Ankara, the capital city, there are five “Syrian Schools”. In this chapter, we highlight the cases of three schools, which are located in very disadvantaged neighbourhoods and pose a variety of challenges. In order to relate to the special characteristics of this context, the theoretical framework considers the understanding offered by the Post-migration Ecology Framework proposed by Anderson et al. (2004) and the conceptualization of Migration Theory (Arango, 2000; Brettel & Hollifield, 2008; Castles & Miller, 2009) in analyzing various aspects of this phenomena.

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