The importance of education for those who have experienced forced displacement is recognised in international law, human rights doctrines and national education policies (Benhura & Naidu 2021; de Wal Pastoor 2016; Dryden-Peterson 2017;).  Education enables forcibly displaced young people to regain a sense of normalcy, develop language competence and relationships in their new contexts  and work towards aspirations, all which help short and long term wellbeing (Dryden-Peterson et al. 2019; Keddie 2012; Ratković et al. 2017).   

Countries in the global north, such as Sweden, the UK and Australia have grappled with accommodating increasing numbers of young forced migrants. These countries have a range of policies that govern not only how young forced migrants should be treated legally and supported socially and economically but also their education provision. These differ for those on recognised resettlement schemes and those who are not. National and regional education departments and schools have a range of policies which apply to all students, including policies regarding the admissible age of students and pathways through schooling systems and beyond.  There are additional policies that specifically relate to recently arrived students regarding access to schooling, language learning support and access to additional supports and resources. This constellation of educational and settlement policies results in a complex landscape for schools and forcibly displaced students particularly those who arrive in their mid- to late teens. 

This presentation focuses on people aged 16-21 who have not been granted permission to stay in the host country indefinitely.  In Australia they are those on temporary protection, bridging and Safe Haven Enterprise (SHEV) visas, commonly referred to as ‘asylum seekers’ despite their recognition in international law as refugees (Refugee Council of Australia 2020).  In the UK they are those who are seeking refugee status but who for different reasons do not have ‘leave to remain’ (https://www.gov.uk/settlement-refugee-or-humanitarian-protection).  In Sweden, they are those seeking asylum whose right to education, assistance and accommodation changes at 18. We describe this group of young people as inbetweeners.  These young people aged 16-21 who are still awaiting decisions on whether they can stay permanently in the countries they are living across the three national jurisdictions repeatedly fall through policy and service gaps, literally and figuratively falling through gaps in between. 

To understand how these students are positioned by the constellation of policies and practices operating on them, we draw together two conceptual ideas.  Firstly, the ‘grammar of schooling’ (Tyack & Tobin 1994) which is understood as ‘the regular structures and rules that organize the work of instruction…for example, standardized organization practices in dividing time and space, classifying students and allocating them to classrooms, and splintering knowledge into “subjects”’ (ibid, p 454).  These aspects of schooling are ‘typically taken for granted as just the way schools are’ (ibid, p 454).  We identify a range of ‘grammars of schooling’ that are operating to marginalise or exclude inbetween students from schooling, including age-graded classrooms, time progression through school and language use and expectations within schools. We argue that the grammars of schooling are utilised as a tool in the governing of migration control.  To augment this,we mobilise the concept of ‘coloniality of migration’ (Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2018) through which ‘colonial legacies of the construction of the racialized Other are reactivated and wrapped in a racist vocabulary, drawing on a racist imaginary combined with new forms of governing the racialized Other through migration control’  (ibid, pp. 17-18).  We argue that through the ‘grammar of schooling’ the structures of schooling which have become internalised and assumed as unchangeable, inbetween students are pushed out, with further implications for migration and settlement outcomes.  

The authors met at the 2019 ECER conference, where we were presenting on schooling opportunities and barriers for refugee background students and how policies shape these. In our conversations, we realised that there were significant opportunities to learn from and with each other about the schooling context in each country. While this paper does not stem from a shared research project, it results from many hours of discussion and online collaboration which enabled us to bring together data from three different research projects to consider cross-national similarities in educational experience and access for asylum seeking students who find themselves ‘in-between’ policy gaps. The three projects on which the data draws are all qualitative studies with a brief overview presented below of each project. In the English context, data is drawn from empirical work underpinning a study of policy and practice of inclusion for refugee and asylum-seeking learners in English schools and colleges (McIntyre and Abrams 2021) and on data from the Art of Belonging project (2022). This comparative place-based study of creative programmes for newly arrived teenagers in England and Sweden observed the various challenges faced by this cohort as they navigated the bureaucracies of life in their new context. The Swedish data are also drawn from the Art of Belonging project and from an ongoing interview project with teachers working with students from refugee backgrounds with various legal status depending on age. The Australian data is taken from The Refugee Student Resilience Study (RSRS), a large, multi-staged Australian Research Council Linkage study, conducted across two Australian states from 2018-2022. The data in this paper is drawn from Phase 2 of the study which interviewed school leaders and staff in seven secondary schools across two Australian states about the ways that these schools interacted with, developed and enacted policies and practices to promote resilience and positive outcomes for refugee-background students. A significant number of these schools reflected on the unique challenges of education and future planning for young people entering schools in their mid- to late teens after prolonged periods of forced migration and educational disruption. We utilise case studies from each country to identify the ways in which the grammar of schooling intersect with the coloniality of migration for young asylum seeking students, who get caught in between various policy gaps in relation to schooling.

The case studies from UK, Sweden and Australia illustrate the ways in which the grammar of schooling operate to constrain education access and experiences for young asylum seeking students. The case study from the UK centres the experience and outcomes of schooling access from the perspective of a young asylum seeking student, Alan. Alan’s experience demonstrates how age-based classrooms, testing and time related progress in schools alongside migration policies which move unaccompanied asylum seeking youth to different regions of the UK ultimately limited Alan’s education options. The Swedish case study presents the perspective of a teacher who struggles with the constraints to supporting asylum seeking adolescent students. This case illustrates how education and the schooling is deeply affected and reproduces, or at least risks reproducing, a simplistic view on migration and education. A composite narrative combined from two schools in Australia (to assist with ensuring the anonymity of these schools and staff) illustrates the strategies school staff were using to overcome barriers that were very specific to this cohort of ‘in-between’ students but also emphasises the sometimes powerlessness they felt and the limited options post-schooling available for these students. The Australian context illustrates how the migration policies and education policies sometimes intersected to push asylum seeking students out of formal schooling systems, but this narrative also illustrated the agency of school staff in seeking ways to circumvent these policies.

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