Education International Research
• Comprehensive information on access to education in different languages should be developed, regularly updated and disseminated to parents, community activists and counsellors in services for migrants and youth. • Access to education for young adults must be improved through targeted programmes for young adults – preferably until the age of 27 – so that they are enabled to catch up on missed subject contents.
The organisation of school integration
There is no systematic assessment of the competences and learning needs of students before they are allocated to schools. Illiteracy is considered as a limit to internal differentiation in preparatory German classes so that special classes are gradually introduced. As a rule, preparatory German classes of varying length precede school integration in regular classes (except for early primary school entrants). As an exception, older teenagers are increasingly taught in special classes that combine subject teaching with German language learning. Refugee students often have substantial gaps in their education backgrounds. These gaps are aggravated by periods in which they only learn German. The issue of subject teaching in parallel with learning German in German schools has not been systematically addressed. There are numerous, but mostly small-scale, projects seeking to improve this situation with regards to, for example, alternative course schedules, curricula, and materials. The following measures are considered as helpful for the initial phase of school integration: • More systematic assessment of initial competences in subjects such as maths, languages and sciences can help to avoid the allocation of students to programmes that do not help them to achieve their full potential. • Subjects should be taught soon after arrival – either in subject courses designed for German language learners or through courses in family languages, for example when large numbers of students with the same family language are in a particular location. This helps to avoid a widening of qualification gaps. • Evaluation and discussion of evaluation results is needed to learn from the wide range of projects and ‘models’ which seek to improve the initial school integration of young people.
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