Provision of quality education in the context of Syrian refugee children in the UK: opportunities and challenges

Abstract

While existing research has shown the importance of the three interrelated domains of the wider policy, the school and home/community environments in the development of quality education for learners, this literature does not fully capture the experiences of the refugee population. In this article we focus on a group of Syrian refugees who came as part of the first large cohort that was welcomed in the UK in December 2015. We adapt Tikly’s quality education frameworks and develop a model that highlights not only the importance of the three intersecting environments, but also the specific inputs/processes that are critical to achieving quality education for refugees. In so doing, we stress the critical role of English as a tool for refugee children’s inclusion and integration in schools. Consequently, the contribution of the paper is an understanding of the inputs/processes that are key to the development of quality education for migrant/refugee children.     

‘More [Time] is better or less is more?’ Neoliberal influences on teaching and learning time

This article examines the neoliberal influences on ‘Port City Schools’ (PCS) unique district-wide extended learning time (ELT) initiative. Despite the recent popularity of ELT in urban schools, there have been few qualitative studies that question how stakeholders make sense of ELT on the ground. This research fills that gap in the literature by exploring ELT programming across PCS’s choice and neighborhood K-8 schools. The interview and observation data reveal an inherent tension between ‘more time is better’ in the enrichment-filled choice schools and ‘less is more’ in the intervention-filled neighborhood schools. Findings illuminate the ways in which school choice, neighborhood segregation, and high stakes testing push the district to use ELT to boost test scores in the lower performing neighborhood schools, while the choice schools are given flexibility in ELT programming because they are meeting expectations for student success. Because neoliberalism fails to take into account the strong relationship between test scores and socio-economics and school choice and segregation, it leads to a cycle of inequality in which children in the choice schools receive a well-balanced curriculum and children in the neighborhood schools get test preparation during ELT. Fixing this system could fix inequalities in ELT programming across all schools.     

School Choice and the Politics of Parenthood: Exploring Parent Mobilization As a Catalyst for the Common Good

A substantial body of research has shown how white, middle-class parents in urban school districts use school choice as a tool to pursue educational advantages for their children. The purpose of this qualitative research was to examine the debate over neighborhood schools and school choice among a diverse group of parents in a gentrifying, yet highly diverse New York City neighborhood that I call “Prospect Point.” My central focus was studying a parent advocacy group that supports neighborhood schools. Findings show that about one third of families living in Prospect Point choose to send their children to charter or gifted and talented (G&T) schools located outside of the neighborhood. Given this outflow of parents and resources via school choice, most of the gentrifier parents in the sample who opted in to the local schools viewed their choice as a politically charged decision, and they credited the parent advocacy group as having influenced it. As a group, they rejected the consumer model of school choice, which they believed put the local schools at a disadvantage and was the norm for their racial/ethnic and socioeconomic demographic. Opt-in parents in this context recognized their privilege, and their children’s privilege, in the school-choice process and actively sought to diminish it through their choice to opt in. This research has important implications for the transformative role that parent mobilization can play in the future of diverse, high-quality public education and our democratic society.     

Rethinking the employability of international graduate migrants: Reflections on the experiences of Zimbabweans with degrees from England

The last decade has seen the rise of literature focused on the rapid expansion of international students in higher education globally and the growing policy discourse around improving graduate employability. However, both, inevitably, have limitations. Together, they tend to homogenise international learners and see them narrowly as simply economic actors. More recently, however, there have been signs of important new developments in both literatures, drawing on interactive employability and capability accounts that stress both agency and structure in more satisfactory ways. We seek to further the development of an account that bridges the new wave of student mobility research and capability–employability research. In doing so, we offer two further elements to the literature. First, we aim to bridge the gap between accounts of international higher education and those of migration and diasporic studies. Second, we deliberately focus on a group that is marginal to the mainstream discourse but who are migrants that have engaged in international higher education in order to improve their labour market prospects, amongst other motivations. We do this through examining the stories of five Zimbabweans who embarked on additional higher educational studies in England after migrating to the country. Through this unique approach, we offer an important new perspective on how the debates on international higher education, employability and migration can be taken forward through closer articulation between these accounts.