Multi-country partnership to enhance the education of refugee and asylum-seeking youth in Europe: Refugee education in The Netherlands

Abstract

The analysis of the data points out different aspects. First, the composition of the student population in Dutch schools has extremely changed in the last couple of years. The number of children of refugees and Eastern European migrant workers has increased excessively. As a result of this growing inflow of migrants, not only are the countries of origin and motives for migration different, but also the social background of migrants and complicated factors such as traumatic experiences have most probably changed. Moreover, it is noteworthy that newly arrived students not only have to make a transition with respect to moving to the Netherlands, but they also make more transitions in the Netherlands than other students do, as is demonstrated in the various analyses of the school population. After all, new coming students make an extra transition from the class for newcomers to the mainstream school after they moved to the Netherlands. All these aspects point out that the population of newcomers, even after their arrival in the Netherlands, is very dynamic on various levels. In elementary school, factors such as age and educational level are carried out in different ways which makes the transition between the different schools even more complicated. In addition, this report demonstrates that there are still no explicit requirements to teach a class for newcomers. However, explicit requirements for teaching a class for newcomers is desirable since the population of newly arrived students is complicated and demands more competences than teaching a mainstream class (Le Pichon, Baauw & Erning, van., EDINA project, Country report, 2016).