Until recently Iceland was portrayed as one of the “world’s most homogenous countries” (Pétursson & Björnsson, 2013). However, the immigrant population has been rising steadily over the last fifteen years, from 3.6% in 2001 to over 12 % in January 2019 (Statistics Iceland, 2019). This has had an impact on the Icelandic schools as they have seen an increase in students with immigrant background. These changes require schools and teachers to respond to the educational needs these students may have.

However the Icelandic school system appears to be unprepared for this change and our qualitative research indicates (Gunnþórsdóttir, Barillé, & Meckl, 2017; 2018) that the schools are failing in its duty to explain its objectives and methods to immigrant parents, thus challenging their understanding of school as a traditional place for learning. Teachers appear to be unsupported in their quest for understanding and managing multicultural education and immigrant parents see many shortfalls in the Icelandic school system. There is only a limited support system and little collaboration between teachers and education professionals when addressing emerging issues connected with increasing diversity in Icelandic schools. The qualitative research indicates that communication between parents and teachers must be improved so that both parties can gain a better understanding of their roles, as well as providing the children with adequate support within the learning process. More importantly, this researches underlines the disparity between foreign parents’ expectations and teachers’ potential to provide a multicultural education (Gay, 2010) that would be satisfactory for all concerned. According to the teachers, the immigrant parents need a supportive network of other parents to help them be more active and integrated as parents of school age children. This can be seen as an opportunity for schools and parents of all children to actively contribute to mutual collaboration.

Several studies on different aspects of immigrants’ lives have been conducted in Iceland, but these were carried out in different localities or have focused on different topics. Education has received more attention than any other topic in the Icelandic context of immigration, and many studies observed the multicultural aspects of Icelandic education (Friðriksdóttir 2015; Ragnarsdóttir & Jónsdóttir, 2010; Sævarsdóttir, Hreiðarsdóttir & Gunnþórsdóttir, 2013; Wozniczka & Berman, 2011) and the problems encountered by foreign students (Bjarnason, 2011). In a relatively recent study by Garðarsdóttir and Hauksson (2011) findings on upper secondary school enrolment and dropout rates among young immigrants show that the situation in Iceland is worse than the average for the EU and EEA countries, as almost 60% of all immigrant males who attended lower secondary school in Iceland, belonged to the group of early school leavers. The first immigrants to Iceland were of working age, but more recently, an increase in the youngest age groups was observed (Garðarsdóttir & Hauksson, 2011). Consequently, schools have to be prepared for this reality.

The study design is quantitative in nature and we used an online questionnaire (Eyþórsson, 2013) to collect data. To recruit participants snowball sampling (Þórlindsson & Karlsson, 2013) was used to contact participants, first through Continuous Education Centres where many immigrants seek Icelandic courses but later on through advertisement on Facebook where we got around 2/3 of the participants. The data collection was structured around municipalities as the main providers of service at the community level. There are 74 municipalities in Iceland ranging in size from only 43 inhabitants to 126 thousand (population as registered in the national registry on January 1st 2018). To preserve anonymity of respondents, only municipalities with an immigrant population of 300 individuals or more were considered for inclusion in the study. Based on this criteria data was collected amongst inhabitants in 12 municipalities in two different surveys: 1) A survey in Icelandic was carried out in a representative sample of all inhabitants aged 18-80 years in the municipalities, which fit the selection criteria. In each municipality (community), the aim was to acquire an effective sample size of at least 300 respondents in each community. The sample was drawn from the national registry and those selected were contacted by phone and invited to participate in the survey. In total some 3,630 respondents participated in this survey. 2) A survey in the immigrant population of Iceland within the same municipalities (communities). The survey was available in Icelandic, English, Polish, Thai, Filipino, Latvia and Lithuanian. In total some 2,214 respondents participated in this survey. The data collected in the two surveys allows for comparison between the immigrant and ‘native’ populations on various issues as well as expanding on existing qualitative research in this field.

Results from previous qualitative research indicates that social background, education, gender, region of origin have an impact on the perception of the Icelandic school system. Preliminary findings from the survey amongst foreigners broadly confirm this. Overall, some 20% of respondents say that they trust the Icelandic school system very well and a further 33% say that they trust the Icelandic school system rather well. For native Icelanders the numbers are 23% and 60% respectively. Immigrants who have personal experience with Icelandic schools report a slightly higher level of trust in schools as do women, respondents with university education and those who live in more sparsely populated areas. Analysis is taking place at the writing of this proposal, in September we will be able to present more detailed results on above issues as well as other variables on the education and school part of the survey.

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