ASSESSING THE FOREIGN CHILDREN’ SITUATION INTO THE ROMANIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. AN EMPIRICAL APPROACH FOR THE REGION OF BUCHAREST-ILFOV.

This research paper analyses the situation of the third-country national children in Romania regarding their access and participation into the Romanian educational system. It is an empirical approach with a special focus on migrant children in the public and private educational system in the Bucharest-Ilfov region where more than a half of the third-country nationals are to be found. The paper provides a qualitative and quantitative analysis regarding the number of non-EU children in the public and private education system in Bucharest-Ilfov, their distribution by age group and type of school: primary, secondary, high-school as well as the schools with high agglomeration of foreign pupils and their distribution in the neighborhoods of Bucharest-Ilfov. The analysis uses, as well, primary data collected during the year of 2013, when a number of 60 schools in the region Bucharest-Ilfov were approached by phone, through emails and face-to-face meetings in order to find out whether they had foreign pupils enrolled in their school and what was the situation on the ground in those schools that reported foreign pupils