Roma education policies don’t work at local level, experts say
"There is no country where the situation of the Roma is good," social affairs commissioner Vladimir Spidla told journalists on the margins of an event organised by the Swedish EU presidency to share experiences and potential solutions for a better inclusion of Roma children in the national schooling systems.
Roma children face segregation in local schools (Photo: Amnesty International)
He stressed that there was no isolated solution, but one that included parents´ employment, better housing and access to social services.
Mr Spidla expressed concern over serious human rights violations in the Czech Republic and even deadly attacks on Roma in Hungary, as well as the killing in Germany of a man who protected a Roma family.
But he also stressed that some countries are making progress and adopting legislation of non-discrimination and social inclusion.
However, these national initiatives were hardly visible on the ground, where mayors and local school authorities still favour segregation, experts taking part in the discussions said.
Systematic segregation of Roma
A high proportion of Roma children are never enrolled in schools and when they are, it is mostly in special or correctional schools, segregated from non-Roma children, said Mihai Surdu from the Roma Education Fund, a Budapest-based NGO funded by the American billionaire George Soros.
In Romania, the country with the largest Roma population in the EU, 15 percent of Roma children have never been enrolled in a school programme. In Serbia, the situation is even worse, with the figure rising to 25 percent.
"In Slovakia, 60 percent of the children enrolled in special education in the year 2008-2009 are Roma," Mr Surdu said. A "disproportionate placement in special schools" was also found in Hungary, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro.
If in a normal school, a child learns all the letters of the alphabet in one year, in a special school, it can take between three and six years to do so. No foreign languages are taught in special schools and the use of Roma teachers or assistants is virtually non-existant, he detailed.
An official from the EU commission´s regional policy directorate shared her experience after coming back from a visit to Slovakia, where she visited some 30 Roma settlements. She was struck how deeply entrenched the segregation policy works at local levels, with mayors "proudly" showing the EU officials new settlements built for Roma, but without transportation or education facilities, not to mention job opportunities.
"They would simply move them from a ghetto without sewage systems to one with such systems. But there was no creche, no bus, not even a proper road to this place," she said. Doctors were also systematically profiling Roma children as unfit for regular education, in order to "push them" into special schools, she said.
Hungarian MEP Livia Jaroka, herself of Roma ethnicity, said that all these facts were well-known and it was no use of ´re-inventing the wheel´ as long as there was no change in mentality on a local level.
"It´s no use to talk about national policies adopted in the capitals, as long as the attitude towards mayors and school authorities remains the same. If parents say they don´t want their children to be in a same room with Roma, then mayors and school directors act accordingly, despite all non-segregation policies," she said.
EU platform vague and inefficient
Several NGOs working on Roma issues have criticised the so-called EU Platform for Roma Inclusion as being to vague about the aims and means to achieve a de-segregation of Roma children.
"The platform should include employment, health care, housing, access to justice and measures against hate crime and anti-Roma violence," the EU Roma Policy Coalition said in a statement. The umbrella-network encompasses several NGOs working on Roma issues and called for the establishment of a special secretariat within the EU commission to deal with these problems.