Consultant

Project Title: Towards an Inclusive Education for Refugees: A comparative Longitudinal Study

The Centre for Lebanese Studies at the Lebanese American University is looking to recruit a consultant to conduct a policy analysis report on the legal status and education of refugees. The consultant should have excellent reading skills in English and German to be able to review the policies documents in both languages.

Length of Assignment: 21 Working days from the 21st of August till the 21st of September 2018

Remuneration: $4500 for the period of assignment

Background/Rationale:

This policy analysis task is part of a larger comparative longitudinal study of the refugee education provisions (policies, programs and practices) in four countries offering different types of refugee settlement: Lebanon, Germany, Australia, and Turkey. The study examines the impact of settlement and education provisions in these different settings on the education progression of refugee children over a five-year period. The study targets Arabic-speaking refugee children who fled the Middle East and North Africa, and who have been enrolled in formal education during the past two to three years in these four countries. The main hypothesis of this research study is that refugees’ education experiences are affected by the type of settlement, the education provisions, and parents’ cultural/socio-economic background in the hosting country. 

The study aims to investigate and answer the following questions:

Questions:

1. What are the various existing legal status/settlement policies for refugees?

2. What are the various existing paradigms of education provisions (policies, programs and practices), for refugees?

3. To what extent have the various education provisions demonstrated the progression (or regression) of refugee education?

4. To what extent refugees’ educational attainment is affected by settlement policies and legal status (i.e. short-, medium- and long-term settlement)?

Description of the Task:

This policy document analysis is concerned with migration and refugee legislations and education policies for refugee children. We need to conduct a policy analysis report of settlement and education policy for refugees in Germany and how it changed in the last 7 years, and whether there was any correlation or mutual dependence/effects between the two types of policies. You will be required to look for policy-related documents (governmental and non-governmental), code the data in Nvivo, analyse it, and draft a final report.

 It will look into the following issues: 

1. How did settlement and education policies for refugees change since 2010 to date?  (i.e. residency, mobility, employment, family reunification etc. as well as access to education, language, registration and documents needed, welcome classes, curriculum adaptation, etc.)

2. How the change in settlement policies affected the education policies for refugee children?

3. Whether these policies (settlement and education) affected enrolment rates and educational outcomes and integration levels of refugees.

The policy analysis will look into these types of reports:

1. Previous policy reviews of the aforementioned types of policies 
2. Law documents (on education policies for refugees, as well as repatriation and settlement policies, non-refoulment, etc.)
3. Strategy and intervention documents for education or settlement 

Outline of the Policy Analysis Report

In each of the targeted countries, a policy analysis report will be prepared. Therefore, the write-up should follow the outline below. All policy themes below are meant to be examined over the past 6 years (since 2012 up to the present).

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Context: Country Demographics

• Aims and objectives of the report 
• General figures and numbers of refugees and their conditions
• General figures and numbers of school age refugee children

(enrolled in formal and informal education / type of schooling - public, private, temporary centres)

Chapter 2: Methodology

(types of documents and analysis methods. This can be brief) 

Chapter 3: Findings 

Refugee legal status and settlement policy

• References to repatriation and refoulment
• References to legal status and pathways to settlement (if any)
• References to employment and work
• References to the future of refugees
• Role of humanitarian agencies vs government

Education

• Objectives of education policies for refugees

(including length and duration of the education planning for refugees)

• Priority areas in education planning

(together with the plans explicit planning priorities, we want to look for references to and usage of INEE)

• Enrollment policies and actual conditions

(paperwork, residency, and other documents required, pre-schooling welcome/language classes, grade placement, retention/dropout/out-of-school etc.)

• Curriculum adaptation

(subjects, language, integration/segregation)

• Teaching foreign language
• Academic route vs vocational education
• Nonformal education
• References to secondary and higher education
• Participation of refugee communities in school planning (parents, teachers, students, and other stakeholders)
• Role of humanitarian agencies vs government
• Funding

Chapter 4: Conclusion

• Challenges, bottlenecks and good practice