“The impact of conflict, violence and displacement on education in Iraq is nothing short of devastating,” said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s Representative in Iraq. “Large numbers of children – those in host communities, displaced from their homes, as well as refugee children from Syria – continue to experience significant disruptions to their education, putting Iraq at risk of losing an entire generation to conflict.”

This quotation from Peter Hawkins, who is UNICEF’s Representative in Iraq. Hawkins is taking about the effects of the current conflict in Iraq. It seems that education is being affected by the conflict from all directions, and the children who are trying to access it are the ones who are losing out.

One major issue is that 5,300, which is 20% of schools, are no longer able to be used for education. This is because they are being used to house refugees or other displaced people. They are also being used by the military or are simply not safe for use due to being in a state of disrepair. The effect of this is that some children will no longer have a school which is close enough for them to attend and therefore they may have had to stop going to school because it’s not practical as it is too far, too dangerous, or costly to make the journey to access education.

On top of this, it has been reported that in the past year “67 attacks on schools and education personnel were reported”. This is a huge number of attacks and understandably will have scared those who work in education and those who access it. This would mean that teachers and other staff members are likely not wanting to go in to work and parents similarly do not want to put their children in unnecessary danger by sending them to school.

Another issue is, that in “northern Iraq, nearly 14,000 teachers have been forced to flee violence.” This means that there are far fewer teachers than there should be teaching in Iraq. This can mean that children do not have qualified teachers giving them an education so they will not learn as effectively, and may also not learn the correct material. The other issue is that it could mean that schools have to close and children begin to receive no education at all. I would argue that this is a massive brain drain for the country.

And what is the ultimate effect of all of the above? Well, in my opinion, in just a few years Iraq will find that they have an entire generation of children without an education. This will mean that they will find themselves without facing a shortage of people to become doctors, nurses, dentists, infrastructure workers etc. Iraq is going to have to work especially hard to deal with this problem in the very near future, so I believe that they need to work on education as soon as it is possible to prevent further issues related to health, crime and other social issues.

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