Internationally, the global movement of people resulting from conflict, climate crises and political upheaval continues to be ongoing issue.  Education plays an important role in the successful settlement and lifelong outcomes of young people who are displaced and become refugees or have refugee-like experience. Because of this, research into young people from refugee backgrounds in education systems tends to focus on examples of ‘good practice’ in terms of how these young people experience education.  Research on ‘good practice’ for educating students from refugee backgrounds has tended to focus on three specific approaches, namely welcoming and non-racist environments, support of students in terms of psychosocial needs and trauma, and English language acquisition (Rutter 2006; Sidhu et al., 2011). Much research on ‘good practice’ in schools promotes homogenising discourses which fail to account for how refugee background young people come to school with a range of experiences pre-and-post-migration. In addition, examples of ‘good practice’ in refugee education commonly fail to consider how schools engage in particular practices in very different contexts. This paper contributes to the study of refugee education by drawing attention to the ways that school contexts influence how schools enact ‘good practice’ in differing ways.

Researchers in a range of fields have been increasingly focused on the importance of context in understanding people’s lives (Bolling et al., 2018; Bösch & Su, 2021; Gu & Johansson, 2013; Harris & Jones, 2018; Rendón, 2014; Thrupp & Lupton, 2006). In this paper, we explore how contextual factors affect how schools respond to the needs of students from refugee backgrounds. By contextual factors we mean, in the broadest sense, school characteristics (e.g., school type, ethos, history, size, complexity, staffing profile, curriculum), and student characteristics (e.g., race, class, gender, wealth, language, sexual orientation, ability, geographic mobility) (Gu & Johansson, 2013). In particular, we are interested in how school leaders recognise and respond to the different contextual influences that shape their responses to the educational needs of these students. Our central argument is that current research on ‘good practice’ in refugee education does not give due consideration to the role of school contexts, and in turn the development of policy and funding relating to refugee education also does not consider the importance of school contexts.

An analytical framework to consider school context was developed by Braun et al., (2011) to identify the contextual factors which influence policy enactment. Described as an heuristic device, the intention of their framework is to reveal how the “rational, organisational, political, symbolic and normative are messily intertwined in ‘policy work’ in schools” (Braun et al., 2011, p. 587). As Slee et al., (1998) and Sellar and Lingard (2014) highlight, the ‘bracketing out’ of contexts and school performance reveals flaws in policy analyses which neglect the objective features of school contexts – for example, analyses of school organisation and pedagogy which ignore material contexts. Braun et al.’s framework considers context in terms of objective and subjective resources across four overlapping and interweaving contextual dimensions (Braun et al., 2011, p. 588):  

• Situated contexts (such as locale, school histories, intakes and settings).
• Professional contexts (such as values, teacher commitments and experiences, and ‘policy management’ in schools).
• Material contexts (e.g. staffing, budget, buildings, technology and infrastructure).
• External contexts (e.g. degree and quality of local authority support, pressures and expectations from broader policy context, such as Ofsted ratings, league table positions, legal requirements and responsibilities).

Our analysis illustrates the ways that situated, professional and material contexts, in particular, shape the ways schools seek to address the educational needs of students from refugee backgrounds.

This paper draws on research from a larger Australian Research Council Linkage funded project entitled ‘How schools foster refugee student resilience’. The project was a large multi-stage study which aimed to understand the ways in which schools foster the educational and social conditions which enhance the resilience of students from refugee-backgrounds, with a focus on how these students are impacted by particular policies, practices, relationships and events. In this study students from a refugee background were identified as those who had come to Australia through humanitarian or asylum-seeking pathways, with a focus on students who had been in Australia for less than ten years. Seven case study schools were selected based on meeting all or some of a set of criteria for ‘good practice’ in refugee education. Participating schools were recruited from the government and Catholic education sectors in two states of Australia. A ‘focussed ethnography’ approach (Knoblauch, 2005) was used to investigate policy development and enactment in the selected schools. This approach involved two data-intensive visits to each participating school. During the first visit members of the research team undertook interactive walking school tours usually led by the school principal or other school leaders. During these walking tours, photos were taken of the physical environments and discussions between school staff and the research team were audio recorded. We then conducted semi-structured interviews with 56 teachers and school leaders at subsequent visits to the schools with a focus on policies of importance for students from refugee backgrounds, policy development and implementation, the role of school staff in enacting policies, and the practicalities of reinforcing or bolstering the resilience of students from refugee backgrounds. In addition, relevant policy texts were collected, and some informal discussions became additional data. All recorded interviews and discussions were transcribed by a professional transcription company. Analysis drew on Braun and Clarke’s (2022) approach to thematic analysis, which involved the entire research team engaging with transcripts through reading and discussion in order to develop a thematic coding framework. Data analysis was completed using NVivo 12, with all interview transcripts and other related data coded against the thematic framework. This paper draws on this analysis to show how differing contextual dimensions influence the ways schools respond to the educational needs of students from refugee backgrounds.

The seven case study schools had significantly different school contexts. Using Braun et al.’s (2011) framework, we examined the situated, professional and material contexts of each school and analysed how these influenced the provision of education for students from refugee backgrounds. The research demonstrated that, although not necessarily outlined as policy, the way that schools respond to the needs of students from refugee backgrounds is strongly contextual. Aspects of school contexts including school histories and student intakes, previous school experience working with refugee background students, school values and ethos, staff knowledge and experience working with refugee background students, and finances and resources to support these students all significantly influenced the practices that schools engaged in. While school context is important, equally the diversity and context of refugee background students themselves is a further important consideration (Keddie 2012; McIntyre & Abrams 2020). The contextual factors of schools attended by refugee background students are often overlooked, with an assumption that good practice in refugee education looks the same everywhere. Over a decade ago, Matthews (2008) described the approach to refugee education in Australian schools as ‘piecemeal’; today, we still see a system which lacks policies or a systemic approach which can be tailored according to the contextual influences of individuals schools and students. This is similar across most refugee-receiving nations globally. Our research illustrates that the situated, professional and material contexts of schools are essential dimensions which influence, inhibit and enable the enactment of ‘good practice’ in refugee education. A consideration of these contextual aspects is crucial in the development of policy and funding models in refugee education.

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