Giving Compass' Take:

• More than half of refugee children are not enrolled in school which is a considerable barrier to rebuilding their lives. 

• Education is paramount in helping refugee children repair their livelihood and move forward. How can philanthropists or development aid workers help schools take in/support more enrollment of refugee children? 

• Read about the different ways donors can help with the Giving Compass Refugee Crisis Guide. 

More than half the world's school-age refugees are excluded from education as host nations struggle under the weight of growing humanitarian crises, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Four million refugee children around the world do not attend school, an increase of half a million from a year earlier, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said in a report. "Based on current patterns, unless urgent investment is undertaken, hundreds of thousands more children will join these disturbing statistics."

The UNHCR said there were nearly 20 million refugees under its mandate, which excludes about 5 million Palestinian refugees, by the end of 2017 as the number of displaced people worldwide grew. More than half were children and 7.4 million were of school age.

Only 61% of refugee children attend primary school, compared to more than 90% of all children, said the report.

The figure is even lower for older children, with less than 1 in 4 secondary-age refugees in school. Just 1% attend higher education, compared with more than a third of young people globally.

Katherine Begley, a senior technical adviser for education at humanitarian agency Care USA, said schooling was a vital step in helping refugee families rebuild their lives. "Education protects and education empowers," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

To address the problem, the UNHCR said refugees should be enrolled in mainstream schools rather than specially created ones, offered extra support, and barriers to enrollment such as requirements for identity documents should be removed.

Read the full article about refugee school enrollment by Sonia Elks at Global Citizen