Lord Hylton – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for International Development

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Hylton on 2016-06-13.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking in co-operation with the government of Lebanon and UN agencies to ensure that all refugee children in Lebanon receive the basic and remedial education that they need.

Baroness Verma

The UK has committed up to £40m per year to support education in Lebanon up to 2019/20 as part of our £2.3bn response to the Syria crisis. We are a key proponent of the regional No Lost Generation Initiative, and endorsed an agreement at the London Supporting Syria and the Region conference in February that all refugee and affected host community children should be in education by the end of the 2016/17 school year.

We are aligning our support behind the Government of Lebanon’s second Reaching All Children with Education Programme (RACE II), working with a range of partners to scale up quality formal and non-formal education. We have already helped expand the Lebanese education system to reach 200,000 Syrian children and are also supporting the expansion of high-quality, standardised non-formal education and training. This includes basic numeracy and literacy and catch-up learning programmes to reach the most vulnerable out of school Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian children and youth. We are also tackling barriers to school entry, protection issues and pyscho-social problems that prevent children accessing education. We also support the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to ensure Palestinian refugees have access to education and training in Lebanon.