Brussels, 12/04/2013 (Agence Europe) - The danger of segregation and being dumped in a sink school or a school with inadequate resources is much higher for the children of immigrants, states a new report from the European Commission, published on 11 April. Their school careers suffer, therefore, and they are more likely to leave school early. Europe has to do better and give better support for vulnerable groups if it does not want a vicious circle to be set up whereby pupils do not have equal opportunities and therefore have worse results and end up in poverty, argued EU Education, Culture, Youth and Multilingualism Commissioner Androulla Vassiliou. She says all children, irrespective of their origin, should have the same opportunities to access education that will give them the skills they need in life and give them better work prospects.
School autonomy should go hand-in-hand with targeted action. The report reviews national policies for helping immigrant children integrate (children newly arrived in the host country) in 15 countries that have seen large numbers of immigrants recently: Austria, Flanders in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. It stresses the importance of school autonomy and an integrated child support programme for newly arrived immigrant pupils providing language and educational aid, the involvement of parents and communities and intercultural education. Denmark and Sweden have managed to achieve a system based on the provision of targeted aid and a reasonable level of autonomy for schools, but the other countries tend to focus on only one aspect and do not achieve good results. The report discerns five types of education aid: 1) the full model (Denmark and Sweden), giving constant aid in the most important areas to help newly arrived child immigrants settle in; 2) the ad hoc model (Italy, Cyprus and Greece) based on an ad hoc approach with unclear policies and resources that are sometimes effective; 3) the compensatory model (Belgium and Austria): this includes all types of aid with permanent teaching of the language of the host area but not much in the way of educational support and early use of systems for measuring a child's ability and streaming the child accordingly; 4) the integration model (Ireland), comprising cooperation between parents, the school and the local community and well-developed intercultural educational policies; and 5) the centralised initial aid programme (France and Luxembourg), based on a centralised system for immigrant pupils providing school support with well-developed aid programmes for struggling children, language support and awareness-raising among parents.
School segregation and early selection should be scrapped. The report says that schools must avoid early streaming and skills-based selection because this could act to the detriment of immigrant children who have to get used to a new language. The report says monitoring and statistics need to be improved for assessing access, involvement and performance of immigrant pupils and students. (IL/transl.fl)