Welcoming a young person who is seeking sanctuary into an educational setting requires teachers to consider how they might remove barriers to learning and participation, where labels such as ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘refugee’ may ‘form markers of separation, markers of not belonging’ (Slee, 2019, 910). If a young person seeking sanctuary also has an impairment or other additional need, teachers are also required to consider how include this young person under the requirements of United Kingdom’s The Equality Act 2010, in which ‘disability’, another label, is a protected characteristic. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2019) warns that attitudes and beliefs about disability can lead to social exclusion for people seeking asylum and offers guidance as to how to overcome this. In a series of dialogic interviews with teachers based on the work of Buber (1999), this research explores the way in which teachers endeavour to provide a welcoming and supportive environment for new arrivals who are seeking sanctuary and also have an impairment or additional need. There is an exploration of the reasonable adjustments that are needed to create an inclusive environment for young people with intersecting needs. The themes of emotional wellbeing, language needs and the attitudes of the young people, their families and the teachers are explored. There is also a consideration of the ‘SENitizing’ (Migliarini, Stinson and D’Alessio, 2019) of young people by their teachers. A discussion about the categorisation of young people as having ‘Social, Emotional and Mental Health’ needs (DfE and DoH, 2015) as a result of their experiences as a young person who has been forced to migrate is advanced. This research proposes that educators should be supported to understand ways in which the intersectionality of disability and being a refugee might have on a young person’s sense of identity and inclusion or exclusion in their educational community (Bešić, Paleczek and Gasteiger-Klicpera, 2020). This research has implications for policy makers and teacher educators.

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