Education International Research
because, as noted by Lärarförbundet, Swedish teachers are keen to have new teachers enter the profession and are therefore supportive of the programme. Continuous dialogue with the social partners has been identified as key to Snabbspår’s success in the education sector.
Responding to the needs of refugee children The Education 2030 Framework for Action highlights the need for governments to implement “initiatives that respond to the needs of children, youth and adults affected by disaster, conflict, displacement and epidemics, including IDPs and refugees” and develop “targeted urgent strategies for vulnerable and excluded groups”. Sweden has become well known in Europe for having a well-developed system for integrating refugee children into public schools.129 In Sweden, all asylum-seeking children and young people have the right to attend school, and it is the local municipality that is responsible for ensuring they have access to school (and preschool) under the same conditions as everyone else in the municipality. Legally, they must gain access to school within one month. Newly arrived students are provided with immersive second language training in Swedish, but once in school, they have the right to access education in their first language. In line with findings from research on bilingualism and language acquisition, most choose to receive some instruction in their mother tongue in combination with classes with their peers in Swedish. Teachers are provided with professional learning and development (PLD) relating to refugee students, such as pedagogy for teaching multilingual classes and responding to special educational needs. Nonetheless, the programme has its challenges, and there are ways in which the system could be improved. Three will be discussed here. Firstly, Sweden’s teacher shortage means that it is more difficult for teachers who are already overworked to adequately respond to the diverse needs of refugee students. For schools to be sufficiently staffed with qualified teachers, more teachers need to be encouraged to train to enter the profession. Secondly, school segregation poses a challenge. In Sweden, schools are diverse, with high levels of school autonomy, and as a result there are often large discrepancies in education quality and differences in schools’ socioeconomic intake. Whilst some schools have few refugee students, other schools have to respond to the needs of large numbers of refugees. According to the OECD, this can be remedied by facilitating new arrivals’ access to school choice,130 but this solution fails to address the deeper systemic issues with a school system built on market principles.131 Thirdly, according to Lärarförbundet, better education for refugees could be achieved if the PLD offered to teachers was more systematic. Currently, teachers in Sweden should receive about 100 hours of PLD per year, as agreed between teacher representatives and the governments. However, in practice, this is not regulated, and the PLD teachers receive is often piecemeal and on an ad hoc basis rather than focused on building teachers’ skills using a long-term approach and taking into account the lifelong learning perspective of SDG 4. The union regrets that they are not adequately consulted in regards to the content and relevance of the PLD offered.
Conclusions GRO.EI-IE
Though not a perfect policy scenario, numerous lessons can be drawn from Sweden’s efforts to integrate newly arrived teachers and students into local Swedish schools. This case study demonstrates the potential of initiatives in which governments and education unions work collaboratively towards shared goals. If quality initiatives are in place, newly arrived teachers and students (both refugees and immigrants) can be an asset rather than a challenge to the education system and society.
0302 NOITA CUDE
129 See for example this comparison of education for refugee children in Sweden, Germany, The Netherlands and Turkey: https://research.vu.nl/en/ publications/no-lost-generation-education-for-refugee-children-a-comparison-be 130 https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/no-lost-generation-education-for-refugee-children-a-comparison-be 131 See for example, evidence of segregation as an effect of school choice in Sweden https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233071074_School_Choice_ in_Sweden_Effects_on_Student_Performance_School_Costs_and_Segregation
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