Many of the refugees who came to Europe since 2013 are younger than 18 years and thus school aged. Taking Germany as an example for a state with large numbers of asylum applicants (eurostat, 2017), our study determines their school adaptation emanating from the framework of the resource-based model of migrant adaptation (Ryan, Dooley, & Benson, 2008). This framework defines migrant adaptation as the “process through which individuals seek to satisfy their needs, pursue their goals and manage demands encountered after relocating into a new society” (Ryan et al., 2008, p. 7). Therefore, personal, material, social and cultural resources are needed that were often lost during migration. According to the model, the success of the migrant’s adaptation depends on the ability to (re)gain resources in the host country. For children and adolescents, school is the most important institution to gain personal (e.g. self-esteem, hope), social (e.g. friends) and cultural (e.g. language skills, knowledge of the school system) and later also material resources that are needed to satisfy needs, pursue goals and meet demands.

A sense of belonging has been established as a basic psychological need (Maslow, 1968). Successful school participation should provide refugee children and adolescents with resources to develop a sense of school belonging which has shown to be associated with a more positive orientation toward school and class work, with higher intrinsic academic motivation, commitment, and expectations of success and through this also with higher academic achievement. Moreover, students with a higher sense of belonging show higher levels of social competencies, prosocial behavior and empathy (Osterman, 2000).

The secondary school track that students attend is a key aspect of school adaptation in Germany. In Germany’s tracked school system, educational outcomes, labor market success and thereby social integration in general are closely associated with the attended school track (e.g. Becker, 2011). First regional findings indicate that newly arrived refugees tend to attend the lower tracks of secondary schools and are less likely to be enrolled in the highest track (Gymnasium) which leads to a university entry certificate (Kemper, 2016; Panagiotopoulou, Rosen, & Karduck, 2017). Moreover, very often they are not directly integrated into regular classes but learn in special classes for refugees (preparatory classes) where children and adolescents with low German language skills (often of different ages and ethnic backgrounds) are grouped together to acquire the German language (for an overview, see Massumi et al., 2015). These classes have a transitional character and the students should continue in regular classes after twelve months at maximum. Notwithstanding, this practice  has been criticized as refugee students are not always well integrated in daily school activities (Karakayali et al., 2017) and tend to have only little contact to the native students (Panagiotopoulou et al., 2017). However, to date, refugee’s school participation has not been studied nationwide and little is known about its determinants and effects.

We therefore examine refugees’ school participation in Germany. Moreover, we analyze whether regional, family-related and school-related factors are associated with 1) the type of secondary school refugee adolescents attend and 2) attending a preparatory class. Besides, to the best of our knowledge, there are no quantitative studies that evaluate how the attendance of preparatory classes is related to school adaptation. We therefore examine whether attending a preparatory class is related to the development of a sense of school belonging. The review of first qualitative studies on this issue hint at possible disadvantages regarding the possibility to gain social resources (Karakayali et al., 2017; Panagiotopoulou et al., 2017). Therefore, we hypothesize that attending a preparatory class is related to a lower sense of school belonging.

To assess our research questions we use data from the representative IAB-BAMF-SOEP sample of refugees which includes people who arrived in Germany between January 2013 and January 2016 and applied for asylum (Kroh, Kühne, Jacobsen, Siegert, & Siegers, 2017). As in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (GSOEP), all adult household members are interviewed face-to-face and proxy information about their children is assessed. The study is set up as a panel study with three waves from 2016 to 2018. From the second wave onwards, adolescents aged 11 years and older also answer a questionnaire themselves. Data of adolescents from the GSOEP (2016, v33.1; n = 4102) were analyzed as a comparison group. To determine the participation in education and the factors that are associated with it, we draw on data from the first wave (2016) which is already available. These results are presented below. The data include information on n = 3369 refugee minors aged 6 to 17 years (M = 11,2 years, SD = 3,6). 41 percent of them are female and large proportions of them have immigrant backgrounds from Syria (47 percent), Afghanistan (16 percent) or Iraq (13 percent). In 2016, 93 percent were enrolled in German schools, with 31 percent of them in a preparatory class. To answer the research questions, two weighted logistic regression analyses are estimated (n = 902 for type of secondary school and n = 2158 for preparatory classes as the outcome). The regional (kind of accommodation, community size), family-related (underage siblings, partner, insecure residence permit, highest educational attainment of the parents, psychological symptoms of caregiver) and in case of predicting the attendance of a preparatory class also school-related (primary school; low, medium, high secondary school track) aspects are entered simultaneously in the analyses, together with dummies for the German Länder (federal states). The research question regarding the association between preparatory classes and sense of belonging will be tested drawing on a subsample of adolescents from wave 2017. Only preliminary data of this wave are available at this point. Thus, initial results regarding this research question are presented here. The analyses draw on n = 271 adolescents aged 11 to 16 years. Most of them have been enrolled in German schools for at least one year. We intend to analyze the sense of belonging of the adolescents using propensity score matching to control for their different migration experiences.

Refugee adolescents are more likely to be enrolled in Hauptschule (lowest secondary school track; 21 percent) and less likely to be enrolled in Gymnasium (13 percent) compared to native students (8 and 34 percent, respectively). Living in a shared accommodation is associated with a lower chance (OR = 0.27) whereas medium or high formal parental education (compared to low formal education; OR = 2.56 and OR = 3.89, respectively) is associated with a higher chance to be enrolled in Gymnasium. Only regional factors (living in a shared accommodation, or in big cities) are associated with a higher chance whereas duration of stay is associated with a lower chance to be enrolled in a preparatory class. First analyses of the preliminary data show no association between the attendance of a preparatory class and the sense of school belonging which is generally rather high (M = 3.6, SD = 0.5; scale from 1 to 4). Our findings indicate that most of the young refugees already gained access to the educational system in Germany, although they are at a high risk of attending lower school tracks. Especially young refugees who live in shared accommodations, where they face adverse learning environments (Behrensen & Westphal, 2009), are more likely to be schooled in lower school tracks and in preparatory classes. These difficult conditions thus seem to impede their gaining of social and cultural resources as they have less contact to native students and less favorable educational perspectives. Nonetheless, first analyses do not show differences in the sense of school belonging between refugee children and adolescents who have been schooled in preparatory classes and those who were schooled inclusively from the beginning. Most schools seem to be successful in providing such conditions to the many newly arrived refugee students so that they can gain resources which foster their school adaptation.

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