Open University and Welsh Refugee Council, ‘″If you only look at the barriers, you can’t move”: Tackling Barriers to Education and Employment with Refugee Women in Wales’, 2026

Open University and Welsh Refugee Council, ‘”If you only look at the barriers, you can’t move”: Tackling Barriers to Education and Employment with Refugee Women in Wales’, 2026.

This report finds that refugee women in Wales face a cluster of overlapping barriers when it comes to accessing education and work. These are: childcare, language, poverty, discrimination, and the non-recognition of qualifications and skills from outside the UK. These difficulties are intensified by immigration policies made in Westminster but felt locally in Wales, especially through dispersal and the lack of safe routes into settlement and work.