This symposium aims to understand policies and practices that facilitate or impede migrant integration in schools across different systems. Schooling raises several issues for migrant students, including adapting to a new language, curriculum and school system, as well as emotional issues, such as coping with loneliness and confusion over unfamiliar cultural and social norms. Within schools, teachers play an important role in promoting migrant students’ learning, socialisation and belonging in their school communities. However, teachers’ work is embedded in the institutional contexts of their school systems and cultures, which shape their discourses, practices and interactions. Teachers in some contexts have reported not feeling prepared for the challenges of cultural and linguistic diversity that coincide with the changing demographics of schooling (Florian & Pantic, 2017). Policymakers have made attempts to facilitate the integration of migrants in schools by providing policy guidance and funding support systems, for example for language acquisition. However, systematic analysis that examine how different policy contexts create conditions for practices that promote migrant integration are scant. For example, how do policies and practices differ in relation to the ways to deploy resources, e.g. by providing additional resources through targeted approaches that address the needs of migrant students, or developing inclusive approaches that support migrant students in the mainstream? What is the impact on opportunities for supporting migrant students’ academic success, cross-cultural socialization and a sense of belonging to the school community? Responses at teacher and school level are central as they directly affect students, and mediate other influences. However, those responses are shaped by the wider social and system contexts that create different condition for integration in different countries.
This symposium gathers papers from Finland, Sweden and Scotland to consider how migrant integration in schools is shaped by the different policy and social contexts. The papers focus on a range of policies and practices that facilitate migrant integration at individual, school community and national levels as well as the interactions between them. Studies conducted within Teaching that Matters for Migrant Students, TEAMS for short, consider how migrant students are supported through professional collaboration between teachers, other professionals and families and how policies at different levels and across international contexts enable or impede such collaborative practices. For example, teachers can work with school counsellors, social workers, mental health professionals, or parents to facilitate migrant students’ integration and shape the process through which they develop a sense of belonging in their school and community. In the study from Finland, authors use the concepts of professional agency (Imants & Van der Wal, 2020) and autonomy (Erss, 2018) that has been a common feature of the Finnish teacher policies to consider how school staff talk when discussing support for migrant pupils. In Sweden the authors examine the impact of mother tongue teaching policies on student ‘multicultural incorporation’ within school communities – an approach to migrant integration that encourages social cohesion while recognising and valuing cultural and linguistic diversity (Alexander, 2006). In Scotland, the authors discuss the data from a longitudinal study of migrant students’ experiences and outcomes of schooling against the backdrop of distinctively Scottish policies in migrant integration within the mainstream provision (Sime, 2018), and comparing this approach to the other two settings. Together, studies from different countries help us to understand how institutional, relational and individual levels interact to create conditions for migrant integration.

Florian, L. & Pantić. N. (2017). Teacher Education for the Changing Demographics of Schooling: Policy, Practice and Research. In L. Florian & N. Pantić (Eds.) Teacher Education for the Changing Demographics of Schooling (pp 1-5), Springer International. please see individual papers for other references cited in the introduction