Romanian education minister says his country has a duty to provide Ukrainian refugee children with access to education.

It’s been a month since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and refugees are continuing to arrive in Romania. More than half a million have so far crossed the border into Romania, being received with solidarity and generosity by their Romanian neighbours. The government in Bucharest said it can provide accommodation to 400,000 refugees, but of the many who have crossed into Romania, few have stayed, and fewer still, only a few thousand, have asked for some form of protection from the Romanian state.

According to education minister Sorin Cîmpeanu, 34,000 of the almost 79,000 refugees currently in Romania are children, and 24,000 of them are of school age. 1,140 of these children have applied to study under the Romanian curriculum, most of them probably belonging to ethnic Romanian communities in Ukraine, a community which is the second largest in that country after the ethnic Russian community. The majority of Ukrainian children now taking refuge in Romania wish, however, to study under the Ukrainian curriculum, and this, says minister Cîmpeanu, requires first and foremost logistical support from Romanian schools, namely classroom space and technical equipment. Sorin Cîmpeanu:

„Romanian schools have stocks of tablets that have not been distributed because additional stocks were purchased. These surplus tablets will be distributed among Ukrainian children, without Romanian children having to go without.”

The government is also planning to permit an exemption from the Romanian education law for Ukrainian children in their final year of secondary school to allow them to continue their high school studies in Romania even if they do not speak Romanian. Under current legislation, pupils can only register to high school if they pass the so-called national evaluation, which is made up of exams in mathematics and the Romanian language.

This week, the authorities in Bucharest are having talks with the visiting European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights Nikolas Schmidt about the integration of Ukrainian children into the education system. (Roxana Vasile, Radio Romania International)