RSN goes to Budapest

For the past 18 months, RSN has partnered with the International Organisation for Migration on a European Commission research project looking at the extent to which unaccompanied asylum seeking children in Europe are able to develop skills and competencies.  With IOM offices and partner NGOs in ten EU member states, we have drawn out promising practices and key gaps in current approaches to assisting these young people.  The research culminated in last week's final conference, drawing together the country teams and policy makers from the participating member states and the Council of Europe.  It launched the comparative report, drawing on national reports from each of the ten participating countries.

 

Although the diversity of the countries represented, and the dramatically different numbers of unaccompanied asylum seeking children present in each country make adopting a common approach challenging at best, and unhelpful at worst (the Czech Republic, for example, has eight unaccompanied minors, compared to several thousand in the UK), there remain common themes that can provide scope for improving practice across the continent.  Providing accessible, quality, relevant education opportunities to unaccompanied minors, regardless of their status, was emphasized throughout the conference, as was the imperative for all countries to move towards foster-family type models of care for young people instead of the large-scale and less personal reception centres which are still the principal mode of care in several EU countries.

 

The reports will be available soon, and we will be sure to post them here!

 

Finally, we were particularly excited to meet representatives from a Vienna-based organisation that also works to improve educational opportunities for unaccompanied asylum seeking children - if you like our work, check out Lobby16... we think they are great!

 

 

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