Being priced out of free courses
A story of structural barriers holding back refugees in Amsterdam

This story starts in a classroom.

Throughout the autumn of 2024, twice a week, I spent three hours teaching A2-level English to a class of around 20 students. We’ll come back to that number in a moment. The classes were run by an organization called Right2Education. When you open their website, you are welcomed by the words: 

“Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: (1) Everyone has the right to education [...] and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” 

They spend their time organizing language courses for refugees and asylum seekers, free of charge, in attempt to provide education that is free and accessible to as many people as possible.

They have spent the last 10 years attempting to do just that. They spend their time organizing language courses for refugees and asylum seekers, free of charge, in attempt to provide education that is free and accessible to as many people as possible. At the time of writing this article, they have managed to do so for over 3700 people. As we are talking about a non-profit NGO, it is worth making clear from the outset that all members of this organization are volunteers. 

Now that we’ve set the scene, we can let the action unfold.

Over the first month of the fall semester, the class I was teaching got reduced to about half its size. Not because of organizational changes, budget cuts, or anything of the sort. People were de-enrolling and de-registering of their own free will. Strangely enough, when I asked one of the students, whom we’ll refer to as Sandra, why her friend had quit, the response I received was that he had a family to feed and couldn’t afford to attend the courses. Checking in with the rest of the class about various other people who had quit often led to the same answer: “They couldn’t afford it.”

By “it,” the students meant the public transport fees which they had to pay in order to attend the courses. 

For you and me, this might sound incredulous. Sure, we are all aware of the exorbitant costs of public transport. We complain about them, propose better systems, compare them to London’s public transport for a change, and then we get on our buses and trams and metros without a second thought. It is expensive, but not expensive enough to deter us going about our daily lives. 

But that’s for you and me.

The difference between us and Sandra’s friend lies in our circumstances. Sandra’s friend was an asylum seeker, which meant that at the time of the courses, he was not permitted to work and had to rely on the allowance provided by the Dutch authorities for his day-to-day life. As you might imagine, the budget of that allowance was not calculated with Amsterdam’s public transport system fees in mind. 

According to The Netherlands’ labour authority, under the Foreign Nationals Employment Act, before asylum seekers are permitted to work in this country “their asylum application must have been under consideration for at least 6 months”. 

This month, August 2026, two years after my first taking notice of the phenomenon, the situation has not changed much, except for the increasing number of students asking about travel expenses. A member of the current board of Right2Education has noticed the same. Many of the students reach out to the organization looking for help with their transport fees. For the most part, what R2E can do is issue enrolment letters, which the students can then use to demonstrate their need for accessible public transport. There are some programmes that allow the students to travel freely to their courses, made available through random selection to those who know where to sign up. 

That’s the easy part. 

However, a large number of students attending language courses at Right2Education and other such organizations have to travel from outside of Amsterdam, from places as far north as Groningen or as far south as Zeeland. These people face much higher public transport costs. Take, for example, the €20 train journey from Groningen to Amsterdam, followed by another €20 on the return trip, twice a week. You can do the math. They also have little hope of receiving free transport through the random-selection programme, as it applies only to those living within the municipality of Amsterdam. Furthermore, non-profit NGOs like Right2Education do not have the funding to cover these expenses for every student throughout the entire school year. 

Situations like these are what sociologists and anthropologists call structural barriers or structural violence. There is no law explicitly keeping people away from opportunities that language learning can provide. Yet the structure and circumstances surrounding them can align in such a way that people are effectively kept from one of their fundamental rights: education. 

Though there is no direct act violence, what we are seeing cannot be categorized as anything other than structural violence. By keeping people from instruction in the languages used in the Netherlands, we keep them from better-paid positions, from the careers in which they are perhaps already experienced, and from the possibility of a stable and prosperous future. By keeping people from legitimate means of employment, especially in such an expensive city, we risk pushing them towards informal or illegal means of making a living. 

All because they cannot afford the bus ride to an English class. 

This is not to say the situation is dire, or that it is impossible to make things right. Everywhere we look, there are people attempting to ensure that people truly have access to education. For example, COA (Centraal Orgaan opvang asielzoekers), provides language lessons on the “premises or allocated locations,” thus giving students who have not yet received status easy access to instruction. Right2Education is already working on plans with the municipality. And, perhaps more importantly, the students can see these efforts being made. They can see systems being put in place to help them change and evolve as the situation around them changes and evolves. But we do have to ask ourselves a question as we delve into the complexities of structural violence: Can we say we helped at all, if we stopped helping at the first hurdle?