This blog was written by Youngbeen Ahn, a doctoral researcher in Educational Leadership and Policy at OISE, University of Toronto, focusing on global governance and education in contexts of displacement.
Refugee education has long been understood mainly through the lens of overcrowded camps, resource scarcity, and fragile education systems in low-income and conflict-affected countries, a focus that remains essential, but is increasingly incomplete. The majority of displaced people are still in those contexts, though UNHCR data shows a steady decline in the proportion residing in low- and middle-income countries, while growing numbers arrive in high-income, non-traditional receiving contexts.
South Korea, rarely discussed in international refugee education debates, offers a revealing case. Consider Myong-yang, a composite individual drawn from documented cases of displaced students in South Korea. Her trafficked mother had fled North Korea via another country, arriving in South Korea without a formal refugee status. Born stateless to a non-Korean father, Myong-yang arrived without the Korean language. For months, she remained out of school, invisible to a system that had no category for her. Under South Korean law, North Koreans are citizens, but Myong-yang, born outside the peninsula, qualified as neither citizen nor refugee. The government support she might otherwise have accessed was unavailable to her. Years later, despite academic success, she found herself ineligible for university admissions support reserved for those born in North Korea. Birthplace, not educational need, determined her access.
Three assumptions
The dominant frameworks of refugee education rest on several widely-accepted assumptions: scarcity is the main barrier to access, legal frameworks protect displaced learners, and high-income systems are capable of inclusion. They have been productive in emergency contexts. In high-income, non-traditional contexts, however, these assumptions begin to fracture.
Assumption 1: Where resources exist, access follows
In high-income receiving contexts, the barrier is rarely a lack of schools or teachers. It is institutional design. In South Korea, a lack of awareness and the absence of related policies, not resources, remain the central barriers, a pattern that persists even where legal frameworks exist. In Chile, school enrolment can be foreclosed by documentation requirements even when a policy framework exists. When bureaucratic categories exclude rather than protect, resources alone cannot guarantee access. Abundance and exclusion can coexist.
Assumption 2: Legal frameworks protect displaced children
International refugee law assumes that legal frameworks protect displaced learners. In practice, they can do the opposite. In South Korea, third-country-born children of North Korean defectors can acquire citizenship, yet could remain ineligible for defector support, falling outside existing classifications: neither a citizen nor a recognised refugee. Japan presents a systemic version of this dynamic. Despite receiving over 12,000 asylum applications in 2024, the government recognised fewer than 200 individuals at an acceptance rate of about 1.5 per cent, leaving the majority in legal limbo without status or protection. When legal frameworks are built around citizenship, displaced learners who fall through the cracks of their categories find that systems struggle to accommodate them at all. They do not merely receive less support. They can receive none.
Assumption 3: High-income systems are capable of inclusion
High-income education systems are often deemed capable of inclusion without guidance, and this assumption largely keeps them outside the reach of international support frameworks. Yet many of these systems were built around linguistic and cultural homogeneity, and thus, those who arrive outside their boundaries face exclusion by design. In South Korea, the system reflects layered colonial inheritances that have long centred a single national identity. In Japan, approximately 20,000 foreign children’s enrolment status remains unconfirmed, and teachers report little preparation for working with displaced learners. In Chile, teacher training gaps and the absence of intercultural pedagogy persist despite policy progress. Displaced learners do not fail to fit these systems. These systems were never built to fit them.
These assumptions are compounded by high-pressure achievement cultures that intensify displacement-related harm, by frameworks that assume temporary displacement and never develop tools for permanent settlement, and by the gap between enrolment and meaningful access. Taken together, they reflect a broader blind spot in assumptions shaped primarily by frameworks that have long centred scarcity and emergency.
What this means for policy and practice
Responding to this blind spot does not mean redirecting attention from emergency contexts, where the majority of displaced populations remain and where the needs are most acute. Rather, it is an argument for expanding the sector’s frameworks because ensuring quality education for all requires tools and guidance that have yet to be systematically developed for high-income receiving contexts.
Gap 1. Coordination architecture: International coordination mechanisms are designed to activate when national capacity to respond does not match the scale, complexity and urgency of a crisis, a threshold designed around crisis contexts that high-income receiving countries rarely face, regardless of what displaced learners within them experience.
Gap 2. Data invisibility: Legal categories produce statistical invisibility, unlike data capacity gaps in low- and middle-income contexts. Displaced learners in legal grey zones fall outside the populations that education data systems are designed to count, and what is not counted does not enter the policy agenda.
Gap 3. Accountability: Displaced learners in high-income contexts rarely appear in SDG voluntary review process. This absence compounds existing gaps in coordination and data, leaving exclusions without any mechanism for accountability.
Responding to these gaps means recognising high-income contexts as legitimate refugee education sites, while developing guidance tailored to non-traditional host contexts. It also means moving beyond resource mobilisation toward policy and legal reform. Central to this is investing in long-term integration frameworks that support permanent settlement, teacher training, curriculum and system strengthening.
The challenge posed by high-income, non-traditional host countries is one of institutional design, not of resources. The question facing the sector is no longer whether high-income contexts should be considered sites of refugee education, but how international actors can support these systems in fulfilling their responsibilities. The answer will shape whether education becomes a space of opportunity and repair, or another setting in which displacement is quietly reproduced.
