Voices: One moment in a child refugee camp changed the way I see the world

Under the shade of a pine tree, Sahar is teaching me the names of her colouring pencils. At five years old, she’s unaware that the words she’s using belong to at least three different languages: Arabic, English and Greek (perhaps also Kurdish, but I’m not sure).

A natural teacher, she tests me as we go, trying to catch me out on the difference between similar colours. Sometimes, when I guess correctly, she pretends I’m wrong, then uses the pencil in her hand to scribble on a scrap of paper as if to prove her point, acting surprised when the green pencil really does produce a green mark.

“OK! OK!” she says, smiling impishly.

Sahar is one of 3.7 million child refugees that don’t go to school. Instead, while her peers around the world are playing and learning with their friends, she spends her days looking after her two siblings. The youngest is so small that the first time I saw them together I thought Sahar was carrying a doll. Of the three of them, only Sahar has lived outside the camp – but she doesn’t remember those days.

Without the structure of school, the three of them drift through camp in a timeless blur. The only times Sahar knows are “now” and “later”. In her world, there isn’t much to differentiate an hour, a day, from any other. At first, I almost envied her this freedom. When I taught at a primary school in London, I’d felt we overregulated children’s time, scripting their activities down to the minute.

But this reaction was hugely naïve. The evidence is clear that even short periods out of education severely impact educational outcomes. Moreover, as recent events have shown, formal education is a crucial way of keeping vulnerable children safe from exploitation.

On Tuesday, Robert Jenrick, the minister for immigration, admitted that around 200 children, mostly Albanian, are still missing from hotels used by the Home Office to house asylum seekers. According to staff at the hotels, many of these will have been abducted by criminal gangs for sexual exploitation and “county lines” drug networks.

Schools don’t just provide a safe haven for such children during the day – they also play a vital role in identifying and protecting those children most at risk. Whether we like it or not, most frontline child protection work is done by the people who see them day in, day out: their teachers.

If these children had been given access to the education and care sectors, instead of kept out of sight in Home Office-contracted hotels, they could have been protected by trained professionals. The Guardian has revealed that, as early as August 2021, senior civil servants acknowledged in an internal document that the Home Office was effectively running unregulated, illegal children’s homes.

The decision to house child asylum seekers in private hotels was politically motivated, by a desire to keep them out of sight and out of mind. Across Europe, despite the best efforts of activists and volunteers, hostility towards refugees, including children, is on the rise.

In Greece the NGO I worked for, which has provided informal education and support for refugee children for the last six years, is one of many to have had its access to camps revoked by the Greek government this month. Meanwhile, in corners of the UK media, there is an obsession with the lazy trope of swarthy foreigners gaining access to the country by lying about their age.

There are cases in which such false claims have been made – the murder of Thomas Roberts by Afghan asylum seeker Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai is an appalling recent example – but the phenomenon has been greatly exaggerated. Less than 1.5 per cent of asylum applicants have been accused of lying about their age; following Home Office investigations, the majority of age claims were ultimately upheld. We cannot allow our hearts to be hardened by this tiny number of awful outliers.

Whatever you think about so-called “economic migrants”, children like Sahar, like those that have disappeared from hotels in Sussex and Kent, do not choose to become asylum seekers. However they reach our shores, we have a duty – at the very least – to ensure they don’t fall victim to exploitation once they’re here.

Jess Phillips, the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, has already called for an end to the policy of allocating children to unregulated accommodation.

But child asylum seekers must also be enrolled without delay into existing schools and care systems. If the Home Office continues to house vulnerable children in private hotels, the numbers of the missing will only continue to grow.