In Europe, the overwhelming majority of the Roma population lives at risk of poverty and suffers from intense discrimination and segregation. Historically, the Roma people endured five centuries of slavery, became victims of genocide during the Holocaust, and suffered from strategic governmental acculturation attempts. Consequently, the Roma population’s socioeconomic status and educational success are below the average for the non-Roma European population. The social inclusion of the Roma community is among the most important topics on the European Union’s agenda; therefore, in 2011, the European Commission adopted an EU framework for national Roma integration strategies, which was reviewed in 2020. The framework is followed by a guide on how each Member State of the European Union should develop their own strategies to promote the social inclusion of the Roma people. However, the lack of significant evolution in the Roma situation regarding socioeconomic exclusion, education, employment, health, and housing in the past decade led the 2020 EU framework for national Roma integration to consider the past integration Strategies as a failure. Romania faces the challenge of integrating the Roma people as well, with low improvement in the Roma minority’s educational and socioeconomic situation and with the maintenance of a strong gap between the Roma ethnic people and the non-Roma Romanian population. Not only do Roma students have lower levels of educational attendance, but they face a system where high levels of school segregation and discrimination against the Roma minority remained present in the last decade. The 2022-2027 Strategy of the Government of Romania for the Inclusion of the Romanian Citizens Belonging to the Roma Minority states that there was no progress in compulsory education and that access to upper secondary education for Roma students in Romania in the last decade has even worsened.

In this paper, we analysed the educational aspect of the Strategies of the Government of Romania for the Inclusion of Romanian Citizens Belonging to the Roma Minority from 2012 to 2027. Looking at the transformations of the Strategies over time will contribute to a better understanding of the causes of the limits and failures they faced and the present situation of Roma educational exclusion in that country, drawing possible implications for understanding the persistent educational disadvantage that Roma people face in education at a European level.

This paper is supported by a qualitative documental analysis performed between April 2023 and August 2023 in the context of SCIREARLY (grant nr: 101061288). SCIREARLY is an EU Horizon Europe-funded project looking into how to reduce underachievement and early school leaving in Europe (https://scirearly.eu/). The analysis focused on policy documents from the Romanian Government that were considered relevant to understanding the educational inclusion of people belonging to Roma populations and used as primary data the following documents: The Romanian Government Decisions nº 1221/2011 and its Strategy of the Government of Romania for the Inclusion of the Romanian Citizen Belonging to Roma Minority for the period 2012-2020; the Government Decisions nº 18/2015 and its Strategy of the Government of Romania for the Inclusion of the Romanian Citizen Belonging to Roma Minority for 2015-2020; and the Government Decisions nº 560/2022 and its Strategy of the Romanian Government on Inclusion of Romanian Citizens Belonging to the Roma minority for the period of 2022 to 2027. This paper also benefits from primary data from the European Agency for Fundamental Rights Roma Survey 2021 – Main Results and the OECD Review of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: Romania 2017 to access Roma educational data in Romania. Secondary information was derived from published literature that looked at the Roma educational reality. The analysis of the documents first compared the structure and content of the educational aspects of the Strategies. Results were brought together with other published data and results in order to build a comprehensive perspective on the persistent educational exclusion of Roma populations in Romania and what may illuminate some of the challenges faced by the Strategies.

The study shows that the structure of the Strategies has changed over time, becoming more precise, organized and better structured when presenting measures. This may facilitate a clearer understanding and the implementation of the proposed actions. The main obstacle, or at least a central one, hindering the effectiveness of the Strategies is that government institutions commonly do not seem to put the proposed Strategy actions in motion. It is important to highlight that this work found prejudiced and devaluated affirmations against the Roma people in the 2015 Strategy, suppressed in the following Strategy. However, a topic in the same Strategy focuses on including the Roma children through vocational education. This may quickly insert them into the job market. Nevertheless, it hampers their opportunity to achieve higher positions of power in Romanian society and expressive economic ascension. It increases the odds of maintaining the socioeconomic gap between the Roma community and the majority of the Romanian population. Another aspect preventing the development of Roma education in Romania is that all Strategies fail to acknowledge the diversity of the Roma people and their conditions and contexts of living, acting regardless of the specific characteristics of each Roma group and context. Furthermore, there is a lack of monitoring of implementation and results, with an evident lack of data collection on the vulnerabilities of Roma populations, on the contextual factors linked to it, and on how strategy measures were implemented and affected them. Without addressing some of these issues, the urgent need to transform the educational reality of the Roma minority in Romania is likely to be again delayed.

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