Conference Agenda

This proposal is based on the initial findings from a small-scale exploratory study carried out in England to support migrant children with special educational needs (SEN). This study built upon the outcomes of a workshop conducted at ECER in 2019 and a subsequent literature review of migrant children with SEN in Europe (Jørgensen et al., 2020) and project report (Jørgensen et al., 2021). The present study aims to develop these by exploring the information needed to support migrant children with SEN. The study concentrates on English school settings and explores how best to collect it from the perspectives of a range of key professionals working in the field of SEN. The findings are explored ecologically as it is argued that this framework provides practitioners with a way to understand these needs and the context from which they arise. This research has recently used by a leading international charity. The next phase of this work is to work alongside this body to look at information needs from the perspective of parents and carers with the intention of creating an information gathering tool for schools in Europe and elsewhere.

Migrant children constitute approximately 4% of the under-15 population in Europe (Janta & Harte, 2017) and an average of 4.4% of all European children have an official identification of Special Educational Needs (SEN)(European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education, 2018). In England 16.6% of children have been identified with some form of SEN (Office for National Statistics, 2022) highlighting differing national approaches to identification and assessment (Jørgensen et al., 2020). Across the UK, it is estimated that 6% of children under the age of 18 were born abroad (Fernández-Reino, 2022). However, both in the UK and internationally, little data exists on children who are both migrants and have SEN. This intersection between migration and SEN is an under-explored area in educational research, as well as in school practice. Migrant children with SEN are a highly heterogeneous group of children, due to their differing family and cultural backgrounds, social and community networks, experiences of school systems, type of SEN and reasons for migration (Jørgensen et al., 2020, 2021). They may experience particular and/or additional challenges when arriving in the educational system in the receiving country, especially if their schooling has been disrupted due to migration. These difficulties can be further augmented by a lack of common language and if there is paucity of information accompanying the children (Oliver & Singal, 2017). This highlights the importance of context in relation to the country of origin, the receiving country, and any potential journey between the two.

Context is an important theme within the work of Bronfenbrenner (2005) and its educational derivatives i.e., Anderson et al. (2014) who argue that children should be understood holistically through the different environments - or ‘ecologies’ - in which they are raised. For children who are migrants, these ecologies shift in line with the children’s immersion in differing cultures and school systems, which may vary significantly in relation to identification and understanding of SEN and degrees of inclusion. For practitioners, understanding the complex ecologies of migrant children who also have a special educational need are thus key to supporting them in schools and more broadly.

Building upon the review and the subsequent project report, this study aims to the questions:

• What would be the best methodological approach to collect better data and facilitating better understanding of migrant children with SEN?
• What information do practitioners need in order to respond to the needs of migrant children with SEN?

In Portugal, the annual official data on pupils of immigrant origin, published by the Directorate-General for Education and Science Statistics of the Ministry of Education and Science (DGEEC/MEC), specifically refers to citizenship status (Cândido and Seabra 2019; Seabra and Cândido 2020). However, this data overlooks pupils of immigrant origin who have Portuguese citizenship or those who have acquired the host country’s citizenship (children of immigrants). Given Portugal’s favourable nationality policies promoting immigrant naturalization, it is apparent that the official data underestimates pupils with an immigrant background.

Grouping a large proportion of pupils with and without an immigrant background under the category ‘nationals’ hinders the identification of long-term educational integration and the comparison of inequalities in educational opportunities for immigrants and their children, relative to their native peers. This approach fails to provide insights into the effectiveness of school systems in supporting the growth and development of immigrant pupils (OECD 2019). Consequently, a comprehensive understanding of the reality of migration in Portuguese schools becomes challenging, potentially leading to a positively or negatively biased portrayal and contributing to the formulation of inefficient public policies.

Furthermore, official statistics have scarce information on academic performance, only displaying grade transition rates by national origin (i.e. citizenship). These are limited indicators of academic performance because they only give a snapshot of performance at a particular moment in time.

In this article, we intend to overcome the abovementioned problems using the recently available student-level microdata provided by DGEEC/MEC. This microdata has variables containing information on the student and parents’ countries of birth, enabling us to accurately identify pupils with an immigrant background, as well as to look at students’ school path by creating a proxy variable on the number of times each student has repeated a grade in the past. This constitutes an approximation to a longitudinal analysis of inequalities concerning the degree of system-level social and ethnic selectivity.

Our goals are as follows:

1. Given the paucity of studies of national scope encompassing pupils with an immigrant background, this article’s analysis is guided by two primary objectives. First, we aim to go beyond the limitations of citizenship classification and understand the advantages of employing a more comprehensive classification scheme. To achieve this, we compare enrolment and academic performance using categories based on citizenship (national/foreign) and those based on their parents’ country of birth (immigrant origin/native).
2. Acknowledging that research in Portugal is limited to and primarily concentrated with children of immigrants as a whole (Mateus 2022), our objective is to examine migrant heterogeneity by analytically deconstructing the assumed homogeneity within this category. In doing so, we introduce subcategories related to generational status (first and second generations), type of ancestry (parentage of mixed origin versus single origin) and national origins.
3. Considering that the national origins groups are categorised according to student citizenship in the official statistics, we aim to compare how enrolment and academic achievement between and within national origins vary according to the criteria chosen to delimit the group (student citizenship or parents’ countries of birth). We also aim to compare the academic achievement of national origins by generational status and type of ancestry.

Lastly, since socioeconomic contexts also explain differences in academic performance, we use “student’s socio-economic index” to explore whether the gaps we identified in these comparisons persist.

This explorative literature review aims to examine the aspirations of youth in situations of migration in Europe as reported by recent empirical studies. Although issues of migration have come to occupy an important place in European policy and public debates (Eberl et al 2018; Goubin , Ruelens & Nicaise 2022), an overview is still lacking at the intersection of youth, migration and futures. How newcomer youth perceive their future in society and the futures to which they aspire have consequences for the strategies they adopt in studies, choice of career path and integration. Extended periods in limbo and uncertain futures can in the longer term affect their faith in institutions, their understanding of democracy and the extent and manner of their civic engagement.

The ways we understand, perceive, conceptualise and represent the future play a fundamental role, both in human societies and in individual lives. Futures are closely linked to power and agency. Clearer understanding of constraints and options could inform more responsible policy or enable marginalised groups to act more effectively, based on their capacity to ‘read the world’ (Valladares 2021). While social elites mobilise considerable resources in shaping futures the capacity to imagine alternative futures (Rubin & Kaivo-Oja 1999; Amsler & Facer 2017) can also open pathways to empowerment for groups in situations of disadvantage.

Migrant youth face disadvantages that are equal to or worse than other marginalised groups, making access to education a challenge. Basic needs such as food, housing and healthcare must be met before educational needs are addressed. Other barriers include language acquisition, trauma, interrupted education due to exile and unrecognised previous qualifications (Gateley 2015). Nevertheless, studies in various contexts suggest that young refugees show strong resilience, positive future expectations and high motivation at school, which Lynnebakke and Pastoor (Lynnebakke & Pastoor 2020) examine within the concept of educational resilience— ‘the heightened likelihood of educational success despite personal vulnerabilities and adversities brought about by environmental conditions and experiences’. Lynnebakke and Pastoor understand both resilience and outcomes as produced in continuous interaction between individuals and features of their environment. This apparent paradox between positive future expectations and challenging circumstances has been theoretically explained in diverse manners, including ‘immigrant optimism’, ‘dual frame of reference’, ‘blocked opportunities’, ‘information deficit’ or ‘ethnic capital’ (Lynnebakke & Pastoor 2020).

The vision young people have of their possible positions in society, in relation to what careers and employment possibilities will exist in the future, influences their motivation to invest in upper secondary education and to pursue career paths that require post-secondary qualifications (Facer 2011). Teachers are often not well prepared to teach diverse classrooms, but formal education is important for newcomer youth, particularly in the case of refugees (Alesina, Carlana, Ferrara & Pinotti 2018). Furthermore, research suggests that teacher expectations have a significant impact on educational achievement (Papageorge, Gershenson & Kang 2020).

For students from disadvantaged groups, education and employment aspirations may represent prospects for their families and communities to escape hardships and historical constraints (Webb 2021). Nevertheless, Goring et al. (Goring, Kelly, Carbajo, Brown & 2023) caution that framing young people’s perceptions of their future as limited to aspirational trajectories of education and employment does not do justice to the complexity of how youth see themselves in the world today. They argue that this framing rather corresponds to a reduction of human life to value in economic production systems. This literature review will therefore cover both research on education and employment, as well as studies that deal with other topics.