Improving the education quality for refugee children: perspectives from teachers at refugee education centres in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Many refugee children have not only suffered from their negative past experiences but also faced challenges to cope with their current difficulties and to improve themselves for a better future. Education is a strategy to assist these refugee children in tackling these difficulties, and a key factor in ensuring the success of education is the quality of teachers. This study uses the job demands and job resource model as a framework to understand the job demands of teachers at refugee community learning centres in Malaysia and their available resources, and the resources that the teachers need to meet their job demands. Purposive sampling was used to recruit 52 refugee teachers, and focus group discussion was used to collect data. Thematic analysis was then used to analyze the data. The results showed that the main difficult job demands are handling the classroom due to the lack of facilities, space and professional training. The diversities in students’ language levels and cultural backgrounds and the psychological problems of students increase the difficulties in classroom management. Support from different parties to provide relevant resources is needed for refugee teachers to tackle their job demands so that a better-quality education can be provided to refugee children.