Factors affecting the schooling of 16-24 year old immigrants in general adult education
In recent years, 16 to 24 year old youths from immigrant backgrounds have been growing in number in adult education centers, in order to finish their secondary schooling, principally in the Montreal region. This paper offers a synthetic description of this specific youth population’s education trajectories and of the principal situational, dispositional and institutional factors affecting them, targeting particularly institutional practices. The data, on which this paper is based, comes from interviews realised in two researches dating from 2007 and 2012, consisting of a first exploratory research, with 104 participants and a second research with 184 participants. The results, summarised transversally in our paper, synthetize the compared perspectives of different agents and the youths themselves in adult education centers and school boards on the studied factors and suggest some avenues for reflection and action for decision-makers and practitioners, more particularly concerning “academic francization” services for those who are continuing their high school education, evaluation and placement tools, the implementation of auxiliary services and of new pedagogical approaches, the retention of this population in the youth sector until 21 year’s old, and the transition from youth sector to the adult sector.