The 2022 UNHCR Refugee Education Report tells us that children forcefully displaced from their homes are significantly more likely than their non-refugee peers to be excluded from schooling. Indeed, 48 per cent of refugee children at school-age are excluded from education (UNHCR, 2022). Something of the consequence of this exclusion is captured by Dina Nayeri (2022), in her account of the lives of children in Katsikas, a refugee camp outside Ioannina, Greece, entitled The Waiting Place. Nayeri (2022) – herself a former refugee from Iran forced to endure months of her childhood in a refugee camp in Italy - characterises this place as ‘a beasty limbo’, that ‘wants children to … forget the hours, the days’, and ‘doesn’t want them to go to school’. This paper advances the argument that, living in this limbo, endlessly waiting to be educated, children are excluded not simply from meaningful educational activities but from opportunities to become the creators of their own narratives about what their lives mean now and what they might come to mean to the future. Ultimately, this exclusion constitutes a twofold failure of welcoming – it is to fail to welcome young people into meaning educational experiences and a failure to welcome refugee children to become creators of their own, unique, and meaningful lives. Using the case of contrasting educational measures taken to accommodate children and youth arriving between around 2015 and now, this paper will explore differences in education provision. The xenophobic and anti-migrant rhetoric used by country leaders and media in Europe, the violent acts against refugees, under-served reception centres or unlawful detentions at the European borders are only some of the challenges, refugees from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan or Somalia have been experiencing in Europe (Esposito, 2022). The flexibility to access schools, the possibility of bilingual education, and the recruitment of Ukrainian teachers were some of the regulations put into practice at a remarkable speed for the students arriving from Ukraine. Contrasting these two approaches, the authors aim to question the exceptionality of Refugee Education from an inclusive perspective.

Esposito, A. (2022). The limitations of humanity: differential refugee treatment in the EU. Retrieved from https://hir.harvard.edu/the-limitations-of-humanity-differential-refugee-treatment-in-the-eu/ Nayeri, D. (2022) The Waiting Place. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press. UNHCR (2022) All Inclusive: The Campaign for Refugee Education. Available: https://www.unhcr.org/uk/education.html#:~:text=Close%20to%20half%20of%20all,countries%20was%2068%20per%20cent. UNHCR 2022 UNHCR Refugee Education Report. Available at https://www.unhcr.org/uk/publications/education/631ef5a84/unhcr-education-report-2022-inclusive-campaign-refugee-education.html