Education: Hope for newcomers in Europe
6, in this volume) to the Swedish mixture of centralisation and decentralisation, all four countries share one common feature. It is about the variety of local practices in place to implement national legislation and rules acknowledging refugee children’s right to equal and high-quality education. One reason is that not all countries have adopted national guidance or a legal framework regulating what, how, and under what circumstances education ought to be provided to newly-arrived children. In Spain, for example, this has been left to Autonomous Communities and, in Germany, to the 16 Länder. One of the recommendations in published research (see, for example, Bunar, 2015a; Nilsson Folke & Bunar, 2016) is that these regulations are of vital importance, in order to avoid significant deviation in quality locally. In some municipalities and schools, the results obtained are excellent but, in others, they are very poor. For instance, Sweden and Italy, unlike Germany and Spain, have adopted guidelines assisting local authorities and schools; however, a wide variety of practices could be detected, some more appropriate than others. This means that two refugee children with similar backgrounds could be subject to two completely different sets of measures and pedagogical practices, something that ultimately leads to uneven outcomes. The point is that these local variations have nothing to do with a child’s individual background, educational and emotional needs. They are due to local material and discursive circumstances: resources, historical patterns of organisation of schooling for newly-arrived children, concerns for what enrolment of refugee children could mean for a school’s reputation (Morland & Birman, 2016), available space, the number of teachers and their pedagogical skills. An obvious conclusion is that, firstly, a set of national guidelines describing a minimum set of local requirements must be adopted and made obligatory. Secondly, some kind of monitoring, follow-up, and evaluation must be established to assess how national regulations, in spite of goodwill and local challenges, are respected in reality. In addition, there is a need to address the discernible tension between age, migration, and education, perhaps most visible in the case of unaccompanied minors. These are the children under the age of 18, who have arrived in the country of asylum without parents or another guardian. In all countries, there is an additional protective social net composed of social workers and appointed legal guardians who cater for the children’s welfare. Regarding education, and as reported in Grigt’s Italian study in this volume, the majority of unaccompanied children are aged between 16 and 18. Instead of being provided with a place in regular schools, they are systematically steered towards Provincial Centres for Adult Learning (CPIA) and thus “directed away from mainstream education” (p. 22). In Sweden, as reported by Bunar in his contribution, once they have reached the age of 18, unaccompanied minors still in the asylum process are not granted an automatic right to switch from a specially designed language introduction programme, at upper-secondary education, to other tracks leading to graduation. As asylum seekers, they are banned from the adult education 3