Schools are used to tailoring support to meet the individual needs of young people, but even the most experienced teachers may find it a challenge to cater to the needs of refugee children.
As well as having English as an additional language, these pupils may have experienced trauma or be lacking family support, if they arrived in the country unaccompanied. All of this can intersect in complex ways, affecting how easily they can access the curriculum.
Meeting the needs of these children is not easy, but with the number of people seeking asylum in the UK rising - the year ending March 2022 saw an increase of 56 per cent from the previous year - it is something that teachers need to get better at.
So, how can staff help refugee children to overcome the barriers they face?
Sarah Dryden-Peterson has dedicated the last 15 years to find an answer to this question. Formerly a middle-school teacher in the US, Dryden-Peterson is now an associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and founder and director of REACH, which promotes research, education, and action for refugees.
She’s spent the last decade and a half travelling around the world, interviewing more than 600 refugee children and teachers from 23 countries, to better understand their experiences, what they need to access education and how schools can support them. Here, she shares those insights with Tes.
Tes: At an average school in the UK, refugee children will represent just a small minority of pupils, but what is the bigger picture here?
Dryden-Peterson: Half of the world’s 26 million refugees are children. Their lives are often dominated by exclusion and uncertainty about what the future holds, and even those who have the opportunity to attend school face enormous challenges, as they struggle to integrate into unfamiliar societies and educational environments.
We know that the number of refugees globally is growing, and the chance of experiencing unwanted displacement as a result of conflict and climate change is increasing. Research shows that once displaced, refugees now live in exile without a permanent home for between ten and twenty years; they are less likely to go to and finish school, they are less likely to learn, and they are less likely to feel like they can contribute to their communities.
This needs to change.
In your experience, what’s the best practice when it comes to integrating refugees into schools?
Let’s start with what doesn’t work.
In some places, refugees are separated from nationals when it comes to education, whether in refugee camps or a “second shift”. The latter is when they are put in different classes and taught the language of the host country first.
This idea that refugee education should be in isolation from a broader host community, or from education in general, is so detrimental in so many ways.
Over and over again, refugee students in Lebanon, who attend a second shift, told me that the structure made them feel as if they were constantly behind, that they weren’t welcome, and that they were intentionally kept separate.
We see this in US schools too, where students are in “sheltered immersion” programmes intended to help them learn English.
Language skills are very important, but so is keeping students in the normal classroom community.
Where should a teacher start when it comes to supporting any refugee children they may have in their class?
Often, we have this idea that a refugee’s education starts when they arrive at the school. But actually, we need to take the time to understand what educational experiences they had prior to that.
Refugee children will have experienced all kinds of disruption in their education: it might be that they’ve moved from one school to another because of conflict in a particular place, or that schools have closed for periods of time, or they might have experienced disruption in the trajectory of learning because curriculum looks different in different places.
A student who began their education in Syria, and then moved to Lebanon, before arriving in the UK may have very strong skills in lots of areas, but they don’t necessarily add up to the same sequence that a teacher might be used to experiencing.
Teachers should take the time to really understand what students have learned and ask questions that can open up the space to understand what those learning experiences have been like.
Are there any barriers teachers should be aware of when trying to have these conversations?
One of the key findings from my research is that expectations of school systems, and what the relationship between a teacher and student looks like, can be so varied from one place to another.
Not only is there often a language barrier, but there is also this navigation of different cultural norms about what’s appropriate to ask of a teacher and what’s appropriate to share with a teacher.
Where these norms are made much more explicit, both to families and to students, it can work really well. Teachers need to say things like: “Perhaps this isn’t like your previous experience in schools, but I welcome information about those schooling experiences, I’d love for you to come to me with questions that you have”.
Some refugee children may struggle with elements of the school environment, such as the noise of a fire alarm. How can teachers offer support here?
Fire alarms clearly serve an important purpose. So, these are the real dilemmas, and you have to ask: how do we make sure that this child is not constantly re-traumatised, while also knowing that a loud sound is an important signal?
Are there ways to do fire drills on days when the child is not there? Are there ways to create a different space for this class to do a fire drill, while knowing that, in the moment, the child will need to know that they need to leave if there’s a fire?
If we think about some of the extreme experiences that those who have been forced to flee their homes have had, and the ways in which classrooms are not set up to address those needs, perhaps in fact, we can think about how we can make our classrooms in general, more safe, more welcoming, more inclusive of all students.
How important are other students in making refugee children feel welcome?
Ensuring that all the children can come together and get to know each other along lines of similarity is really important.
Refugee students don’t always want to focus on the difference that they have in terms of a process of migration, they don’t want to be defined by refugee status.
Maybe they both like to play soccer, love to read poetry or have memories of eating outside with their families - whatever it is, we need to facilitate conversations around these similarities between students.
Enabling enough space and time within classrooms to do that is hard, especially where the curriculum is quite rigid, and where teachers are constantly under pressure to meet sets of standards to move on to the next step.
And yet, without them, students really can’t learn. They need to feel this sense of belonging and the sense of being part of something where they feel safe in order to create the conditions for learning and opportunity.
While some refugees will arrive in countries alone, others do come with their families. Do schools need to support parents, too?
Families and parents are such critical partners in children’s education. Being able to create spaces for parents to ask questions and to seek support matters.
However, I’m also of two minds on this.
Around the world, we demand far too much of our teachers. We expect them to serve all of these different roles, which are so important for our communities. But without the right resources, without access to translators, without time in the day, without additional information, it’s unfair for society to demand that teachers do all of this work.
Right Where We Belong by Sarah Dryden-Peterson is out now
