Promoting THE EDUCATIONAL rights of children

Asylum seeker children’s educational journey starts in ‘children warehouses’ – unsupervised daycares operated by unqualified workers from the communities who often do not speak the children’s language, and characterized by very low educational and care standards. At the age of three, Once these children are integrated into the Israeli school system, they face additional barriers and challenges – for the most part, asylum seeker children attend separate schools that do not address their specific circumstances, nor respond to their special needs. As a result, the educational achievements of most children in primary school is very low, and many reach high school with poor language proficiencies – they often can barely read and write, their verbal language skills, both in Hebrew and in their mother-tongues, are poor, and in many cases their cognitive and emotional development is severely impeded.