Schools across Europe are seeing a growing number of students with migrant backgrounds. This new reality raises questions on how schools should adapt in a way that is beneficial for the migrant students in terms of their integration and inclusion into the school systems. To tackle some of these questions was the aim of the NordForsk-funded research project Teaching that Matters for Migrant Students: Understanding Levers of Integration in Scotland, Finland and Sweden (TEAMS).
Seven secondary schools in Sweden, Finland and Scotland in the UK were examined for three years with a focus on teacher and wider school practices, resulting in almost 30 outputs and more in the pipeline.
“We looked at what the schools do that facilitates integration. Although we were looking at a specific group, migrant students, we were also interested in the whole school environment”, says project leader Dr Nataša Pantić from the University of Edinburgh.
The project used a mixed-method approach. A social network analysis based on surveys with school staff and students was complemented with qualitative data from interviews and observations at the school sites.
Need for time to collaborate
A pattern found across the data, both quantitative and qualitative, is that there is a lot of tacit knowledge among school staff on issues related to migrant students. The project findings call for more time and space for close collaboration and exchange of this tacit knowledge between teachers, health care workers, social workers and other school support staff.
“You can’t expect teachers to know all the details of cultural differences or how to best help migrant students. But they need to know where they can get the information and support from and who they can collaborate on these issues with”, says Pantić.
Therefore, it is important to create collaborative, inclusive cultures at schools.
“School leaders are key figures who can facilitate these interactions. In the best practice examples, there is a family-like environment in the school and genuine care for the students and other staff members.”
Sweden is on the forefront in developing structures that further these environments, a fact largely driven by demography. There are generally more migrant students in Sweden and the staff force is also more diverse than in Finland and Scotland.
“In Sweden, there's a school where the staff have daily informal discussions of students’ needs and weekly meetings with other professionals, such as the health team, to talk through student issues as well as positive developments. But that’s unusual”, says Pantić.
In Scotland, there is emphasis on diversity as something important and policy documents say teachers should be ‘agents of change’.
“But this doesn't correspond to what we see on the ground in Scotland because there's no time for teachers to work together and with other actors. And in Finland the famous autonomy of the Finnish teachers is largely limited to their classroom pedagogy, while the new ways working collaboratively to meet the diverse student needs requires whole-school approaches”, Pantić says.
Teachers with migrant background are important
Other than time for sharing knowledge, Pantić also calls for more investment in teacher development and mandatory diversity training.
“Teachers must have structured opportunities for learning, because increasing student diversity in class is now a norm in our schools, and every teacher needs to deal with it.”
But even if the structures are still lacking Pantić sees a positive trend in the findings which is that teachers are very committed to their students regardless of their background.
“There is a lot of willingness from teachers to go beyond their job description to support their students”, she says.
Teachers who themselves have migrant background are found to be most proactive and engaged in the support of migrant students. They are also seen by their colleagues as useful resources to help understand the migrant student’s situations and cultural backgrounds. Pantić emphasizes this as something to be considered on national and regional policy level.
“What we can learn here is that there is a need to diversify the teaching force to reflect the increasing diversity of school populations. And that has implications for recruitment. How do you attract people of diverse backgrounds to become teachers, how do you train them and how do you support them once they are in school?”
Read more about the project: