Preparing for the new school year

The United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, has told IRIN the children of Iraq should be encouraged and assisted to return school in the first week of September, adding that parents were reluctant to send their children to school because of security concerns and fear of rape and abduction. Speaking in Baghdad, UNICEF communications officer Geoffrey Keele said: "The most urgent educational needs for Iraqi children is to prepare them to return to school this September." Underlining that school attendance was not a new problem, Keele said that prior to the recent conflict, almost 25 percent of Iraqi children did not go to school. "These children have to be encouraged and assisted to return to school," he said. "The ministry of education extended the school year by one month to enable children to catch up on the classes they missed during the war and its aftermath, but many parents were reluctant to send their children to school because of the lack of law and order, and fears of children being abducted on their way to class," Keele explained. Measures are also needed to promote the attendance of girls at school, traditionally lower for cultural and sometimes economic reasons, humanitarian workers say. "We think there is a special need to encourage girls to go back to school, because we have found that although the returnees to schools have been quite strong, it hasn't been as strong among girls as boys," John Kilkenny, emergency coordinator for the Dublin-based NGO Concern Worldwide, told IRIN from the northern governorate of Salah al-Din. Kilkenny said the high rate of female abduction and rape in the lawless days following the fall of Saddam has kept girls away in large numbers from the schools. "Particularly because parents are a little bit unsure about security. They are a little bit nervous about sending their girls back to school," he said. Concern Worldwide is rehabilitating a number of primary schools in time for the start of term in Salah al-Din. It has been restoring electricity, water and sanitation facilities, and erecting blackboards. The NGO is trying to get a better idea of needs by assessing a number of schools in districts of Salah al-Din. The Iraqi Minstry of Education has a huge task to confront, given that thousands of schools and educational supply depots were systematically looted during the breakdown of law and order following the war. Despite the looting, delays in paying salaries, and lack of coordination from the ministry, between 23 June and 7 July 5.5 million Iraqi children successfully completed their year-end exams. UNICEF believes that the successful organisation and completion of these exams under such difficult circumstances is an important confidence-building measure for the battered education system. UNICEF is busy distributing 43,000 educational kits, which are expected to be available in all governorates by August, ready for the start of the school term in September. The handy kits contain learning materials for 80 children and consist of pens, scissors, individual blackboards, chalk, exercise books and rulers. They were used successfully in post-Taliban Afghanistan last year, where hundreds of thousands of children returned to school. UNICEF is also assisting in the planning and implementation of nationwide terminal exams for 1 million students at primary, intermediate and secondary school levels. Low quality educational provision has been a problem in Iraq for decades. A pre-war UNICEF report entitled "Children's Right to Education" highlighted lack of resources available to both planners and families, which means the system lacks proper text books and equipment and that teachers' salaries are very low. Shrinking family incomes mean demand for education continues to drop as children, especially girls, are withdrawn from school to work at home or outside.