people and planet

14
MIGRATION AND FORCED
DISPLACEMENT
Voluntary and forced population movement affects
the education opportunities and needs of hundreds of
millions of children, young people and adults around the
world. It also increases challenges for host governments.
Four groups are discussed in this section: internal
migrants, international migrants, internally displaced
people and refugees.
The largest population movement is internal migration,
usually rural to urban. Migration statistics rely on
censuses, carried out every 10 years. As a result, regional
and global estimates are available only with considerable
delay. The latest estimates, from 2005, suggest that
globally 763 million were living outside their region of
birth (UNDESA, 2013). It is more important for education
planners to know the intensity of internal migration
flows; over the past five years, it has been above average
in countries including Chile, the Republic of Korea and
Senegal (Bell et al., 2015).
China has experienced what is considered the largest
migration in human history (Chan, 2013). A household
registration system restricted access to public schools
for children of rural migrants in order to discourage
them from moving to cities. Substandard private schools
were created to serve rural migrant children, attended
by 60% of those in Shanghai and 75% in Guangzhou in
the early 2000s. The government then abolished fees
for rural migrant children in urban public schools and
provided additional funding to the schools to help
absorb these students. By 2010, the proportion of
migrant students attending public schools had increased
to 74% (Hao and Yu, 2015).
Despite problems in accommodating the influx of rural
migrants, who often move into slum or peri-urban areas
where public school access is limited, migration to urban
areas generally facilitates access to public services.
Analysis for the 2015 GMR showed that even if primary
completion rates had remained constant in urban and
rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa, the increase in the
share of people living in urban areas would have been
enough to raise the average primary completion rate
by 1.5 percentage points between 2000 and 2010
(UNESCO, 2015d).
Although much smaller in magnitude, international
migration attracts far more attention. In 2015, 244
million people were living outside their country of
birth and the proportion of international migrants in
the total population was 3.3%, compared with 2.8% in
2000. South–South migration exceeded South–North
migration for the first time in 2015, though immigrants
remain a significant share of the population in high
income countries in Europe (10%), Northern America
(e.g. 15% in the United States) and the Pacific (e.g. 28% in
Australia) (GMDAC, 2016).
In high income
countries, the
In high income countries, education-related
experiences
first-generation immigrant
of immigrant
students scored about
students are of
50 points below students concern. Firstgeneration
without an immigrant
immigrant
background in reading and
students scored
mathematics
about 50 points
below students
without an
immigrant background in reading and mathematics
in the 2012 PISA in OECD countries, while secondgeneration
immigrant students scored about 20 points
below. Still, the difference in mathematics performance
between students with and without an immigrant
background shrank by around 10 points between 2003
and 2012 (OECD, 2015d).
The challenge for policy-makers is that students with
an immigrant background tend to be concentrated
in schools in socio-economically disadvantaged
areas. If the socio-economic status of students and
schools is taken into account, the average difference in
mathematics performance in OECD countries between
students who attend schools where more than 25% of
students are immigrants compared to students who
attend schools with no immigrant students drops by
almost 75% (OECD, 2015d).
Voluntary migration can disrupt education but can
also have benefits. Both domestic migrants in China
and international migrants in OECD countries may not
do as well in school as their peers in host communities,
but tend to do much better than if they had stayed
in their communities of origin. In contrast, forced
displacement tends to lead to gross violations of the
right to education.
The number of internally displaced people (IDPs) has
been growing. At the end of 2014, 38 million IDPs were
2016 • GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 271