Gareth Thomas – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for International Development

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Gareth Thomas on 2016-04-28.

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment she has made of the implications for her policies of the finding of the Syria Relief Network’s survey of refugees that only a third of Syrian child refugees currently attend school; what assistance her Department is providing to ensure that more Syrian child refugees receive an education; and if she will make a statement.

Mr Desmond Swayne

The UK, alongside UNICEF, has led the No Lost Generation Initiative (NLGI), which supports education for children in Syria and the region. We have allocated £122 million to NLGI since the start of the crisis, providing formal and non-formal education for hundreds of thousands of children in the region. We have improved early grade education, provided non-formal education and counselling in Jordan, and boosted formal, non-formal and catch-up education for underserved children in Lebanon. Our programmes provided catch-up classes in essential subjects for more than 160,000 inside Syria, and textbooks for more than 350,000 in Lebanon.

In February we hosted the Supporting Syria and the Region conference in London, where participants agreed that all 1.7 million refugee and vulnerable children in countries neighbouring Syria will be in quality education by the end of 2016/2017 school year. DFID committed to increase funding on education in Jordan and Lebanon to £240 million up to 2020/2021 and is currently designing new programmes, aligned behind national education plans, to help deliver these ambitious goals.