Budapest / Hungary (RNN Correspondent) 08.02.1998

Some of Hungary’s schools are segregating Roma children by educating them outside normal classes despite laws banning the practice, a conference was told on Wednesday.

The conference on the educational situation of Roma, organised by the government’s National and Ethnic Minorities Office, heard evidence that up to 10 percent of Roma children are educated separately from Gadje without the consent of their parents.

Inoffical Roma Parents get a small account of money, from the Hungarian Gouverment when they sending there children direcly into special need classes.

It added that thousands of others are unnecessarily placed in special needs classes.

‘‘Five to 10 percent of Roma children are segregated into separate classes,’’ the report’s author, Peter Rado of the Open Society Institute ‘‘The parents are not consulted.’’

Rado said that Roma children made up a disproportionately high number of children in schools for the mentally handicapped and for pupils with special learning difficulties.

‘‘The total percentage of Roma children in the education system is 7.2 percent, but in the special needs schools the rate is about 50 percent,’’ he said. ‘‘This means about 15,000 pupils are delivered to these schools and only a small proportion of these are really handicapped.’’

Rado said Roma children also tended to be excluded from extra-curricular activites such as swimming lessons or extra English classes. He said the reasons for segregation had more to do with teaching methods than with prejudice. ‘‘In central and eastern Europe the pedagogical methods are much more curriculum-centred than personality-centred,’’ he said. ‘‘The teachers don’t pay too much attention to the cultural background of pupils and the personality of the pupils.’’

He added that the law banning segregation needed to be clarified. ‘‘The law says that segregating members of ethnic or national minorities is illegal but it does not say anything about what segregation actually means and there is no mechanism for checking, ’’ he said. Lajos Aary-Tamas, legal adviser to Hungary’s Ombudsman for Minorities, said a report by the ombudsman to be published later this month would confirm Rado’s findings.

‘‘We have found a lot of abuses of constitional and minority rights, including segregation,’’. ‘‘There is no educational reason for separation as the curriculum is the same.’’

Aary-Tamas said the ombudsman would recommend that the Ministry of Education improve its communications with schools and local authorities and devote resources to conducting a formal inquiry to establish exactly how widespread is the practice of segregation.