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Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Intissar Ghozlan’s two youngest boys haven’t been in school since the family fled from Syria to Jordan two years ago. There’s no space in local classrooms, and the boys, 12 and 14, can “barely write their names,” having forgotten most of what they learnt back home, she says.

More than 90,000 Syrian refugee children in Jordan weren’t able to attend school last year, along with hundreds of thousands in neighbouring refugee host countries, prompting warnings of a “lost generation” as a result of Syria’s five-year-old civil war.

That’s now changing, at least in Jordan.

Boosted by international funding, the kingdom has promised to make room for all refugee children in its schools, starting this week, by adding more afternoon shifts and hiring thousands of teachers.

For many children, this could be their last chance, said Robert Jenkins, the Jordan representative of Unicef, the UN children’s agency.

“At a certain point, it becomes next to impossible for a child to realise its potential, if they have been out of school that long,” he said.

The back-to-school programmeme “not only will have a great impact on individual children, but on the population as a whole and on Jordan as a whole and on the future potential rebuilding of Syria”, he said.
On Thursday, Hassan Al Ahmad signed up his nine-year-old daughter Aisha and his seven-year-old son Mohammad for first grade in Zarqa, northeast of the capital, Amman.

The siblings, who fled Syria with their parents and two younger brothers in 2014, hadn’t been able to attend school before, but were told they could register this year.

“The most important thing for me is to have my kids in school,” said Al Ahmad, 30, who worked as a farm labourer in Syria and is illiterate. “If my kids don’t go to school, they can’t do anything in life.”
The promise of education for all is part of a broader deal made earlier this year at a watershed conference on Syria aid in London.

Jordan pledged to give refugees access to legal work and education, as a way of keeping them in the region and discouraging them from migrating to Europe. In return, donor countries promised hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, concessional financing and trade benefits to pay for the refugee burden and boost Jordan’s struggling economy.