Refugee Education Statistics: Issues and Recommendations

Refugee education has been, until recently, a largely overlooked issue, and encompasses a vast array of data producers, fragmented tools and data sources, along with non-standardized ways of measuring and reporting education indicators for this particularly vulnerable population. This paper reviews the available data sources on refugee education that could contribute to SDG4 monitoring for refugees, covering access, learning, protection and safety. It examines a range of sources such as UN registration and monitoring data, household surveys, administrative surveys, Education Management Information Systems (EMIS), other school-based surveys, censuses, international learning assessments, national examinations, and operational data to understand where data lies across the data value chain. This review highlights key challenges with regards to: • Identification of refugees, especially using proxies such as nationality or native language. • Absence of disaggregation by refugee status in existing data sources that may cover refugees, such as EMIS. • Over-emphasis on data on access to education, especially enrolment and attendance, while excluding other measurement such as retention, dropout, learning and safety. • Poor integration of refugee education data into national statistical frameworks