Attachments
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Colombia hosts over 1.8 million of the approximately 6 million forcibly displaced Venezuelans in the world, the largest number of any other country (Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela [R4V], 2021b; R4V, 2021a). Since the start of the Venezuela-Colombia border crisis in 2015, the Government of Colombia (GoC) has made important efforts to receive and integrate Venezuelan migrants.
In a historic decision in 2017, the GoC issued a Special Permit of Permanence (Permiso Especial de Permanencia [PEP]) to regularize the migration status of Venezuelan nationals, allowing them to remain in Colombia for two years and granting them access to health, education, and employment services (Presidency of Colombia, 2020).
To guarantee access and integration of Venezuelan migrant and refugee children in Colombia’s education system, the Ministry of National Education (MoE) and Migración Colombia issued a series of nationallevel decrees and regulations. This enabling policy environment has contributed to higher school enrollment for Venezuelan children, which increased from around 34,000 students in November 2018 to over 463,000 students in October 2021 (MoE, 2021a; Presidency of Colombia, 2020). Colombia’s high education expenditure relative to other countries and past budgetary allocations may have also led to higher enrollment of Colombian students as well as Venezuelan migrants. Colombia dedicated 47.3 billion Colombian pesos ($12,551,778) to education in 2021.
Despite this substantial progress, a needs assessment of Venezuelan households in Colombia showed that at least 25% of Venezuelan migrants between the ages of 6 and 17 were not enrolled in schools in 2021 (GIFMM & R4V, 2021c).1 This case study aimed to assess how Colombia’s policy recognizing migrants’ right to education has been operationalized for Venezuelan migrants, the barriers that remain after establishing a policy aiming for full inclusion, and the lessons learned for implementing inclusive policy for migrant populations.
We complement qualitative analysis with quantitative descriptive and regression analyses on the Colombian government’s and UNHCR’s education expenditures.
KEY FINDINGS
Colombia prioritized education inclusion for Venezuelan migrant and refugee children by facilitating access to the country’s educational institutions irrespective of their nationality or migration status. Strong political leadership from the MoE, its collaboration with international partners and other GoC sectors, and a relatively high education budget (as percentage of GDP) facilitated the approach to inclusion for Venezuelan migrants. Because policy evolved rapidly to respond to the fluid migration crisis, schools also encountered administrative and pedagogical challenges that affected students’ educational trajectory, including issues with understanding grade placement and addressing student psychosocial needs.
While Colombia prioritized inclusion of Venezuelan migrants into national education systems, perstudent education expenditures at the department level were not statistically significantly different in departments with a higher or lower percentage of Venezuelan students. Per-student education expenditures were slightly larger in departments with a larger percentage of Venezuelan students, but the differences were not statistically significant for any school type (pre-school, primary school, secondary school, or middle school). The lack of additional per-child education expenditures in areas with a higher percentage of Venezuelan students may have contributed to some of the funding challenges, considering that providing the same education for refugee students is likely more expensive than for host populations (World Bank & UNHCR, 2021).
The GoC and development partners provided some training and programming support to schools, ranging from providing quality instruction in multicultural classrooms to improving teachers’ understanding of policy implementation at the school level. However, school leadership and teachers faced burdens when trying to enroll and fully integrate Venezuelan students in resource-limited schools. Teachers did not feel they had been fully prepared or received sufficient support to provide quality instruction to multicultural classrooms, despite the relatively large government budget for education (4.5% of GDP in 2019).
In addition to the difficulties that teachers and administrators experienced, students also felt the impact of curricular differences between the Colombian and Venezuelan systems. The systemic differences between education in Colombia and Venezuela—including the amount of work, the speed of learning, and the robustness of the curriculum at each level—seemed to cause student learning gaps.
While some students struggled to keep up, teachers also carried much of the responsibility for providing quality education, discussing grade placement with parents, and resolving academic and psychosocial gaps independently within their classrooms.
Despite schools’ challenges with absorbing the influx of migrant students and student challenges with curricular differences, administrators and teachers in the schools where we collected data fostered inclusive school environments. Most principals and teachers expressed welcoming sentiments toward migrants and promoted inclusion through co-existence manuals, activities to combat social stigma and discrimination, and open discussion on inclusion. These approaches created a safe environment that contrasted with outside of school, where migrants experienced more discrimination.
CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Initially, education actors in Colombia were focused on guaranteeing access to migrant students through comprehensive policy changes and proportionally high funding. The response is now moving towards a focus on guaranteeing high quality learning for Venezuelan migrants throughout the full educational trajectory—including tertiary education—to ensure opportunities continue beyond education and into the workforce. Achieving this objective requires identifying and addressing administrative requirements that may act as a barrier to refugee graduation, such as for test taking, as well as introducing legislation mirroring the flexibility in documentation requirements for enrollment as offered by the series of decrees issued for preprimary, basic, and secondary education levels.
In addition, improved communication to the local level on the practical implications of the policies on migrants’ education, including administrative considerations, would contribute to better-prepared schools. Local-level education officials and school administrators need help understanding and applying the regularization mechanism in education. Our study schools’ experience with UNHCR programming points to the benefits of providing resources for teacher training on inclusion in addition to documentation on how to effectively do so.
To address human resource gaps, schools may consider hiring Venezuelan migrants with formal teaching credentials to support Colombian teachers in providing quality instruction to Venezuelan students with different curricular and cultural backgrounds.
Introducing inclusion-related guidance and psychosocial supports in tandem with administrative requirements could help teachers and students feel supported, and dedicated personnel to lead such activities would further reduce the burden on teachers and principals.
It would also be helpful to delineate responsibilities for teachers, administrators, and other personnel, and fund positions that support teachers in these areas.
Given the effect that grade placement has on parent and student morale, it would be useful to communicate expectations for concrete steps students should take to catch up and formalizing standards students need to meet to move to the next grade. Clearer guidelines, paired with ongoing academic coaching, could help increase student morale and long-term retention. In addition, expanding school feeding or other social protection programs could help to alleviate some of the economic pressure on parents that affects student learning. When resources are limited and current achievements are mostly at the output level, financing programs with larger expected effects on learning outcomes could generate additional benefits.
For example, Snilstveit et al. (2016) showed that school feeding programs have significant effects on learning outcomes and our Phase I systematic review showed that technology-aided instruction can improve learning when implemented well (Burde et al., Forthcoming).
Prioritizing national-level funding to certified territorial entities (CTEs) based on the percentage of migrant and refugee children may reduce local-level funding challenges. Temporarily restructuring the distribution of funds from the MoE and the General Participation System (Sistema General de Participaciones [SGP]) to CTEs (municipalities or departments) with the highest needs to achieve education inclusion may reduce some funding pressures at the local level. Currently, departments with a larger number or percentage of Venezuelan migrant students do not spend statistically significantly more on education per student even though education for refugee students is likely more costly (World Bank & UNHCR, 2021). Data from the Colombian Ministry of Education indicate that the average perstudent costs of education are $754.64 for pre-school students, $603.71 for primary school students, and $679.17 for secondary school students. Additional financial support to schools with large populations of migrant and refugee students could be allocated to teacher training, infrastructure improvements, and additional school pedagogical and didactic materials.
This may lead to a more cost-effective distribution of resources and enhance implementation capacity.
International funders could create an incentive structure that stimulates the Colombian government to transparently share education budget and expenditure data that are possible to link to specific education interventions. Open access to detailed government budgets and expenditures on education, as well as an improved national system of data and financial reporting that allows for linking education expenditure data with information on specific education interventions and their effectiveness, can enable researchers and policymakers to estimate accurate costs of providing education, and possibly to link these costs to implementation and effectiveness data, which could in turn guide policies to reallocate budgets to more cost-effective education programming. Better coordination and governance on this topic would also facilitate planning in a decentralized education system.
GLOBAL-LEVEL POLICY IMPLICATIONS
The global community could benefit from recommendations based on the relative success of Colombia’s approach to integrating Venezuelan migrants into the national education system.
The strong collaboration among international institutions and the MoE and a cohesive framework for developing activities and pedagogical routes for inclusion helped create the buy-in needed to raise awareness among local institutions of the importance of an inclusive approach. An inclusive education system also requires the financing of refugee education through government institutions. Colombia enabled the integration of Venezuelan migrants into its national education system by spending 4.5% of its GDP on education, which is considerably larger than in all other case study countries. In addition, almost all funding went through the Ministry of Education as opposed to a parallel education system. UNHCR only spent limited resources on education and no resources on direct education implementation in Colombia. Nonetheless, the Colombian may still require additional funding for education for migrants because of the large number of Venezuelan students.
Requirements for specific documentation unnecessarily keep students out of school; thus, widening the options of documents that can be used to enroll students greatly helps with access and ensuring students do not lose learning. If students lack academic documentation to validate their previous studies and place them in the right grade, schools can use alternative assessments or other academic activities to evaluate student learning.
Beyond documentation, linguistic differences were one of the primary challenges for migrant students to feel included. Even speech differences such as cadence, in the same language, made learning more difficult for students. Policy measures can help ensure students learn in a language they understand and feel comfortable with, thus increasing focus on learning.
Finally, teachers, administrators, and students in the schools in our study emphasized the benefit of open dialogue on the migrant situation as well as on issues of identity, including nationality and gender. Host students said that such conversations helped them to understand differences and be more open to new students, while migrant students said the ability to talk openly about their identity was important to them. Teachers’ skills at facilitating such conversations were instrumental in their success; however, the need for individualized and long-term psychosocial support (PSS) came through strongly. A lack of specialists means that psychosocial responsibilities fall on teachers and administrators who are already untrained and overburdened. Normalizing the inclusion of sufficient, skilled PSS professionals to school staff will likely contribute to student safety and academic success.