Education: Hope for newcomers in Europe
Background Migrant children are not a new feature in European classrooms. They have been arriving for decades, for various reasons, whether as asylum-seekers, children to labour migrants and for family reunification. Anyway, it appears that educators around Europe are astounded by the recent development. Common questions seem to hover as a curious cloud over European schools: How can schools deliver an equal high-quality education to these children? What are the best practices to organise and carry out education? How do they deliver education in these circumstances in other countries? How can national and local government, civil society, and local community support educators and refugee families? The aim of this volume is to bring together experiences from four European countries, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden, on how they have organised the reception of newly-arrived children in their schools, which challenges they face, what are the opportunities, where the support comes from and it has failed to emerge. The four contributions also illuminate the role of education unions. Given their size and power, what do they do? Can they do more to promote equal education for newly-arrived children? To advise on the needs for professional development and support for teachers? What can researchers recommend to policy makers and stakeholders in their respective countries? What can be transferred - and under what circumstances - to other countries? This volume does not purport to compare countries and regions in order to point out who is doing better and who is to “name and shame�. Our ambition is to probe policies, practices, and research to find promising ways to organise and deliver good education for newly-arrived children, but also to discover common gaps and cracks. Filling many of these cracks often does not require billions of Euros in investments, although sufficient resourcing is clearly critical, but does require commitment, interest, attention, and cooperation. Thus, the four contributions in this volume present statistics, national and international legal frameworks, policies, measures, projects, and discourses on integration of the most vulnerable migrants. But it also presents the voices of the refugee children themselves, as well as those of teachers, principals, social workers, and experts. This introduction briefly summarises and analyses some of the main findings in the four contributions. The next section will explore the national legal frameworks, regulating the right to education in the four countries. In the three subsequent sections, the organisation of the reception of refugee students, pedagogical interventions, and the role of education unions are described and discussed. And, the final section presents this report’s conclusions and recommendations.
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