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In Kenya’s refugee camps, Norwegian Refugee Council and Save the Children use Accelerated Education to help over-age out-of-school refugee boys and girls aged 10 to 17 years to catch up on lost learning and transition into formal schools. Their Accelerated Education Programmes (AEP) show that successful transitions require more than academic preparation—they depend on broader mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS), teacher wellbeing, and strong cross-sector partnerships. Daily classroom routines coupled with MHPSS build learners’ confidence, emotional resilience, and readiness to learn. By also training formal school teachers, supporting peer integration, and coordinating across sectors, these models promote smoother transitions, improve retention, and offer powerful insights for refugee education in crisis-affected and low-resource settings.
Key lessons for similar contexts:
- Train all teachers in psychosocial support and social and emotional learning (SEL): Embedding simple, routine SEL strategies in daily teaching—across both AEP and formal schools—strengthens refugee learners’ wellbeing and ensures smoother, more sustainable transitions.
- Strengthen cross-sector coordination to meet learners’ basic needs: Cross-sector collaboration ensures refugee learners access essential services like health, protection, and nutrition, supporting their learning, retention, and long-term wellbeing.
- Promote positive relationships between refugee learners, their peers, and teachers: Letting refugee learners meet teachers and peers or visit formal schools before they transition reduces anxiety, builds confidence, and fosters a sense of belonging amongst refugee learners once in school.
What challenges do refugee learners face in Kenya?
Kenya currently hosts more than 770,000 refugees and asylum seekers, mainly concentrated in Dadaab, Kakuma, and Kalobeyei camps. Refugee learners face multiple barriers to education, including prolonged displacement, trauma, poverty, language barriers, and inadequate school infrastructure. Nearly half of refugee school-aged children remain out of school, and those enrolled often struggle with overcrowded classrooms, unqualified teachers, and psychosocial challenges that severely impact their ability to learn. For these young people, education is more than academics - it is a safe space, offering protection, stability, and a sense of normalcy amid crisis.
How are accelerated education programmes supporting refugee learners?
The government of Kenya has made recent efforts to ensure full social and economic integration of refugees. The 2013 Basic Education Act guarantees refugees the right to education, while more recently, the Refugee Act of 2021 promotes refugee inclusion through access to education, livelihoods, and public services. Complementing this, the 2023-2027 Shirika Plan outlines the government’s strategy to transition from refugee camp-based models toward integrated settlement approaches, strengthening opportunities for refugee learners to be included in national education systems and frameworks. Within these frameworks, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), such as the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and Save the Children, provide flexible, accelerated education programmes to reintegrate over-age refugee learners into formal education.
While education in refugee camps is overseen and funded by UNHCR, accelerated education programmes (AEPs) follow the Kenyan national curriculum, condensed into a shorter period to help learners catch up with peers on lost learning. Learners are grouped by ability rather than age and focus on core subjects such as literacy, numeracy, science, social studies, and life skills. Classes are often held in separate accelerated education centres within or adjacent to formal refugee schools. At the end of the programme, learners sit for national exams and are awarded official Kenyan certification in primary education to transition into formal primary or secondary schools.
What factors are critical to support refugees’ transitions to formal school?
Refugee learners enter AEPs having experienced conflict, trauma, and chronic stress that directly affect their ability to learn and thrive in school. To address this, NRC and Save the Children have coupled social-emotional learning (SEL) in the classroom with broader wrap-around services, including psychosocial support, health, nutrition, sanitation, and child protection.
NRC’s Better Learning Programme (BLP) is their flagship psychosocial support intervention for children in crisis-affected communities globally. First introduced in Kenya in 2019, BLP uses a classroom-based psychosocial support framework that helps both refugee and host community students manage stress and develop coping mechanisms. Teachers are trained in play-based learning and simple, daily exercises that help students regulate emotions and stay focused during lessons. These routines create safe, predictable learning spaces where students feel supported both academically and emotionally. Teachers, school leaders, caregivers, and learners themselves consistently report that BLP has improved children's classroom behaviour, concentration, academic performance, and emotional wellbeing. 1
To ensure that psychosocial support continues beyond AEPs, NRC has extended BLP training to teachers in formal public schools where AEP graduates transition. This equips formal school teachers to better support incoming refugee learners, and allows continuity in the type of psychosocial support provided. Moreover, Save the Children provides psychosocial support outside the classroom, leveraging school-based refugee Lay counselors––community members without formal qualifications who are trained and supported––to provide learners with MHPSS beyond the classroom and school environment. In collaboration with the Teacher Service Commission, teachers also receive support through learning circles, peer coaching, and mentorship mechanisms, as supporting teacher wellbeing is a critical lever of successful SEL programmes (see more in our case study on Colombia). This holistic approach not only enables smoother transitions but also increases retention of refugee learners in formal schools.
Drawing on international standards, Save the Children’s Healing and Education through the Arts (HEART) Framework uses an arts-based approach to deliver psychosocial support. Age-appropriate creative expression allows children to communicate their feelings and build coping strategies, while the Holistic Assessment of Learning and Development Outcomes (HALDO) tool has been adapted to the Kenya context to accurately measure learners’ (ages 4-12) skills in social-emotional learning, literacy, numeracy, and executive functioning. 2 By closely monitoring SEL, implementers ensure it remains a focus of service delivery.
Beyond classroom-level interventions, NRC and Save the Children have used a staged approach to transition refugee learners from AEPs to formal schools. Learners are given the opportunity to visit formal schools ahead of enrolment, meet with prospective teachers, and build familiarity with the school environment. Likewise, formal school teachers are invited to AEP centres to meet incoming students before they transition. This gradual exposure reduces learners’ anxiety, builds their confidence and a sense of belonging. 3
Strong partnerships have been established between AEP centres, formal schools, and community-based service providers to ensure continued case management and follow-up for vulnerable learners post-transition. Save the Children and other Child Protection actors strengthen child protection mechanisms between AEP centers and host community, including through case management systems and confidential child hotlines to track student wellbeing during and after the transition process. Funding from European Commission (ECHO), Porticus, Save the Children Italy and UN agencies such as UNICEF and UNHCR contribute to improving access to safe, quality, inclusive and climate resilient accelerated education, protective education services, anticipatory action in education in emergencies, water sanitation and hygiene (WASH), menstrual health hygiene for girls, and livelihoods for families where boys are at risk of dropping out to earn income.
Despite these efforts, challenges persist. Many over-age refugee learners who transition to formal school still struggle to adapt to the competency-based education and new language of instruction. Moreover, AEPs rarely offer transitions to technical and vocational training (TVET) or alternative pathways, hampering transitions particularly for older students (see our Nigeria case study on the importance of multiple pathways). Equity concerns reveal challenges for refugee learners with disabilities due to inaccessible infrastructure or a lack of qualified specialists.
Lessons for Other Contexts
- Train all teachers in psychosocial support and SEL: Classroom-based psychosocial programmes demonstrate that routine interventions embedded in daily teaching through play- or arts-based learning can make a significant difference for refugee learners. The BLP programme, for example, is intentionally integrated into classroom routines rather than offered as separate counselling sessions, making it more scalable in resource-constrained camp settings. Moreover, by training both AEP and formal school teachers, psychosocial support for refugees is sustained, contributing to smoother transitions and improved retention in formal school.
- Strengthen cross-sector coordination to meet learners’ basic needs: Collaboration across education, child protection, health, and social welfare ensures refugees receive comprehensive services needed to improve learning, retention, and broader wellbeing. Save the Children’s Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) Cross-Sectoral Framework in Humanitarian Settings provides guidance on how to mainstream MHPSS across sectors to enhance coordination across the humanitarian-development nexus. Close collaboration with the government, and aligning with policy priorities, is also critical to ensure a “symbiotic relationship” where all key partners benefit.
- Promote positive relationships between refugee learners, their peers, and teachers: Transitioning to formal school also means transitioning to a new environment, with new peers, teachers, and school leaders. Allowing learners to visit formal schools ahead of time to gradually integrate into the school community helps to build their confidence and a sense of belonging, reducing risks of dropout post-transition.