Education and health are key pillars of development and OfERR Ceylon implements various programs among the schools to address the challenges children face. Education is regarded as one of the most important needs as part of the reintegration needs. Understanding that good education can lit hope in the lives of resettled families, OfERR (Ceylon) gave maximum importance in reintegrating the children back in schools upon return. This is due to the reason that assistance in accessing the Sri Lankan school system, vocational skills training, and other education related services in Sri Lanka will result in more sustainable livelihoods and employment opportunities.

In this line, OfERR (Ceylon) provided assistance for the returnee children with securing enrolment in schools and ensuring better reintegration in the schools in Sri Lanka, providing support with stationery, uniform, shoe-socks to the most vulnerable children, providing support with catch up classes (including language classes) for children below 18, conducting career guidance and counselling sessions for graduates/diploma holders, providing counselling support to motivate and monitor school education & support for reintegration in schools through recruitment of animators/counsellors in the regional offices, support payment to graduates to obtain equivalent certificates for the Indian qualifications, providing travel costs associated with obtaining 10th and 12th standard equivalent certificates and linking the experienced/skilled returnee students with appropriate non-formal education or National Vocational Qualification certificate programs.

To create the Child Friendly Approach, new construction and renovation of the school buildings has been undertaken. On the other hand, trainings were conducted to contribute for capacity development on CFA related activities such as Formation/Activation of School attendance Committee (SAC), Develop and distribute advocacy materials to promote attendance and reintegration, Collect data of dropped out children, and irregular/poor attendance, Preparation of school catchment areas maps, Home visits to reintegrate children, Community based cluster meetings for awareness creation, Teacher training on inclusive education and child friendly approach, Student camp promoting child to child approach & peer study initiatives in educational activities, Seasonal calendars to identify the seasons for irregular attendance,

To support the CFA concept OfERR has supported various tools and mechanisms to enhance the CFA in the School such as Baseline data collection, Toilet construction, Group Happy Hand Washing Unit, Sustainable water supply, Hygiene Promotion training and Menstrual Hygiene Management training.

There is an increased engagement of children in school activities. The local community has been involved in the creation of child friendly environment schools. This program also resulted in sensitizing the government actors involved in the school education, to encourage the schools to have better environments to develop interest among children by promoting child friendly education themes.

In this period OfERR Ceylon assisted XXXXX children including the dropout, re-admission, counseling in the North and East. There were XXXXX children assisted with the support for their education, of them XXXXX children are from returnee families, whereas XXXXX children are from host communities, the latter category of beneficiaries were chosen on the basis of the extreme vulnerability.