In comparison to the non-camp settings in Jordan and Kurdistan, male refugee children in Lebanon have the highest school enrollment rate, with 63 percent of boys in school. Refugee children living inside camps primarily attend schools run by the UN, NGOs, or charitable groups, whereas refugee children living outside camps attend mostly public or private schools. Almost 90 percent of out-of-camp children in Jordan attend public schools. Likewise, as a result of the “second-shift” policy in Lebanon, which teaches Syrian children in an afternoon shift, about 60 percent of school-going children attend public schools.

Syrian refugees spend less on children’s education than host communities, but the difference is owing to the difference in the type of school and area of settlement. For instance, 43 percent of host community children in Lebanon attend private schools compared with less than 4 percent of Syrian refugee children. After accounting for the type of school and the district of settlement, there is no significant difference in education expenditure between the two groups.

The quantitative survey shows that many school-age children are currently out of school in the three host countries, and one of the most common reasons for refugee children to be out of school is economic hardship: they need to work to support the family, or school expenses are not affordable. This is also consistent with significantly higher school enrollment rates for school-age children before leaving Syria in all three regions. In KRI, roughly half of the Syrian refugee and IDP children who are not in school cited economic hardship. Lack of financial means prevents 40 percent of refugee children from attending school in Lebanon, and unaffordability is the most commonly stated reason why children are not in school in Jordan, as well. In Jordan, 50 percent of both Syrian and host community children who are out of school are not interested in going to school.

Even though rates of enrollment among refugee and IDP children are uniformly lower than enrollment rates in the host community (which are more than 85 percent in all localities), the influx likely has placed a pronounced burden on the preexisting stock of inputs in schools. UN agencies—as well as NGOs and civil society organizations—seem to have absorbed a significant part of the increase in demand for educational services, especially in KRI and Lebanon (figure 6). While very few Syrian refugee children attend private schools in Lebanon—signaling considerable segmentation since almost half of the households pay for education—a large share end up in public schools. Nevertheless, we find no evidence that perceptions about education services among hosts have worsened in 2015 compared to 2010 (tables 4, 5, and 6).

Another possible adjustment cost for host community households observing a large influx of forcibly displaced children into the public school system is the transition to private schools, fearing a decrease in quality. It is possible to test this dimension of adjustment by evaluating whether the probability of being enrolled in a public school varies with the size of the shock experienced by a locality. If refugees select places where the public system has more coverage, the association would be positive even if the refugee influx was causing a transition from public to private schools. The regression analysis in Kurdistan confirms this positive association, accounting for initial levels of enrollment in public schools, but the results are not significant or sizable (table 7).

# **6. Conclusion**

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