Education: Hope for newcomers in Europe
be labelled as a promising practice. Municipalities are primarily responsible for financing education through local taxes. Furthermore, dissemination of resources between schools is based on a so-called socio-economic and migrant index, with children from families with weaker socioeconomic background and migrant families receiving more money in a student voucher. Additionally, the national government supports municipalities through a system of state grants, earmarked for particular areas and the government bears all the costs of educating asylumseeking children. The government also allocates additional resources (around ₏50 million per year) to municipalities that have reported the presence of undocumented children in their schools. The National Agency for Education (Skolverket) channels the resources to the local level, but it is also responsible for gathering and disseminating knowledge and promising practices, often done through conferences for local stakeholders. The Skolverket is also responsible for financing and supporting the previously mentioned local coordinators. The entire system is devised, to a certain extent, to relieve municipalities of the economic burden of having newly-arrived children in their schools, to improve the quality of education, but also to forestall negative attitudes towards refugees in municipalities with struggling economies. Resources and support can also be drawn from civil society and their engagement. Cuesta’s study from Spain shows how important it is to work with the integration of entire families and to bridge the gap between teachers and newly-arrived parents (see also Devine, 2011; Bunar, 2015b; Hamilton & Moore, 2004). The main conclusions from this section are as follows. Firstly, support-based inclusion (Bunar, 2016) ought to be the overarching model for organising the reception and education of newly-arrived children, with sensitivity to their individual circumstances. If there is a need for separate classes, during a strictly limited and regulated timeframe, the decision must be based on an initial assessment of the children’s previous education and a meticulously devised educational plan for every child. No schools exclusively populated by newlyarrived children should be allowed to exist. There is no evidence that they are effective. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence of the dire effects of school segregation for the most vulnerable students. Secondly, lack of coordination and cooperation between various stakeholders inside and outside of schools should be resolved by school and municipal leaders as a priority. A first step is to appoint a school coordinator and a coordinator on a municipal level with a responsibility to work with all teachers (inside) and schools, local community, other communities and national level (outside). As long as newly-arrived students are considered as an issue for language teachers only, they will not gain access to meaningful and equal education. As Bunar points out in this volume, newlyarrived students are not just language learners, they are first and foremost learners, just like all other children in schools. At the national level, there is a 7