Due to the Russian Federation’s military offensive against Ukraine which launched on the 24th of February 2022, thousands of Ukrainians have been forced to seek refuge in neighboring countries. The rise in the number of refugees in the EU has created an unprecedented challenge to host countries and their educational systems (Eurydice report, 2022). The Czech Republic has been following a welcoming policy for Ukrainian refugees and has been making efforts to integrate them into the Czech society through different initiatives: the Czech government has exerted efforts to accommodate refugees by supporting them financially so they can have access to Czech public schools and medical services and have free access to the labor market. Thus, the Czech Republic holds a significant role as a host country to 409,008 Ukrainian refugees and the level continues to rise. (UNHCR, 2022). Given the current massive influx of refugees into the Czech Republic, it is both timely and important to conduct the present research as policies related to welcoming refugees are inextricably linked with integration into society including its educational system.

Schools can potentially play a very important role in the life of refugees. They can offer social opportunities for the newly arrived refugee children and serve as a starting point in managing their assimilation into their new communities through a sense of school belonging (Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007; Montgomery & Foldspang, 2008). Thus, the objectives of the study are to identify, explore and critically evaluate multiple barriers that refugee families face when engaging with their children’s Czech public schools as well as different roles of parents in supporting their own children’s learning. Though these topics have been discussed recently, little is known about the parental involvement of Ukrainian refugee families as well as their parental role in Czech public schools. To discover Ukrainian refugee parents’ schooling experiences in Czechia and the ways schools engage with them, this study provides a comprehensive analysis of the current state of affairs. Therefore, home-school cooperation lies in the foreground of this study shedding light on issues concerning the socio-economic status of refugees and the self-elected roles of the parents engaging with Czech public schools.

The following questions will help to address the research objectives:

1.What are the challenges Ukrainian refugee parents encounter when engaging with Czech public schools?

2.What role do Ukrainian refugee parents give themselves in school-parent interaction?

The paper presents results of a study with an exploratory qualitative approach using interviews and an interpretative phenomenological analysis for data interpretation.

Identification of barriers and limitations to home-school cooperation might help Ukrainian refugee children adjust to their new life in the host country. It is hoped that some propositions included in this paper could be used to facilitate the successful inclusion of Ukrainian learners in the national education system proposing a holistic model of integration in education that responds to the learning, social and emotional needs of refugee students and their parents.

As the research project aims to analyse personal experiences of Ukrainian refugee parents, it adopts a descriptive phenomenological approach using a qualitative framework (Creswell & Porth, 2018). According to Willis (2007, p.25) phenomenological research seeks to gain in-depth understanding and explanation of a specific phenomenon through the lenses of refugee parents by using semi-structured interviews. Following Polkinghorne's (1989,) interviews with 5 to 25 people, who have direct experience suffices for a qualitative study. Twelve participants were selected through criterion sampling strategy. The inclusion criteria were: Ukrainian refugee background, having arrived in the Czech Republic between February and June 2022, having an experience with the Czech public school system and being able to speak Russian as the participants and the researcher speak Russian fluently. The participants were drawn from an online forum on Facebook. Interviews followed an interview schedule, lasted approximately one hour each and were carried out in May and June 2022. The sample consisted of one male and eleven female participants with an average age of 38 years. All participants resettled in Prague. Semi-structured interviews were chosen to collect data as they are considered to be among the effective ways of establishing respectful relationships with participants in close proximity to them and obtaining in-depth data (Kvale, 2007). Each interview consisted of 22 questions including questions about demographics regarding gender, age, marital status, number and age of children and location. The other questions in the interview were designed to identify the facilitating factors and barriers encountered by parents when engaging with the Czech school and their role as parents in the Czech school. The parents were asked broad open-ended questions and encouraged to speak freely about their experiences such as: “Could you tell me about your first interaction with a Czech school when enrolling your child?”. Additional follow-up questions were posted to clarify parents’ statements and confirm that the interviewer had understood correctly. Each interview was recorded with a mobile phone, transcribed, checked for accuracy and then translated into English by the researcher herself to achieve a translation as close as possible to the interviewer’s insights regarding the participants (Yanay-Ventura et al., 2020). The choice of this type of transcription goes in line with the phenomenological approach applied in this study as the use of words are very important for the analysis. The transcribed data were analysed using the interpretative “phenomenological analysis” (IPA) (Smith et al., 2009, p.79).

The results discovered that Ukrainian parents encountered a number of challenges but school welcoming environment was crucial in involving them to their child’s school. Participants were able to voice a myriad of concerns and identify a number of barriers to their children’s school involvement. Although each narrative and participant’s experience are unique, some common themes emerged. The interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) resulted in the development of two major themes from the data collected: Theme 1: “Engaging with Czech public schools is challenging” and Theme 2 “Parents’ role in supporting their children in learning at Czech school”. Theme 1 consists of three sub-themes: “poor language proficiency as key stressor”, “lack of information about the Czech education system”, and “insufficient school capacity”. Besides structural barriers, such as parents’ low Czech proficiency and cultural beliefs to school-based parent involvement, the study reveals the refugee parents’ increased stress in terms of their roles as parents when interacting with schools. Being consistent with the discussions on parental involvement in their children’s education, Ukrainian refugee parents acknowledge that they may assume different roles: supporters, actors, consumers and partners of schools. But due to the reasons mentioned above, parents seem to be lost, even though their engagement in schools plays a crucial role in their children’s educational processes. These findings might encourage teaching staff to remain attentive to this complex issue and support refugee parents in addressing this concern, as parent educational involvement is an investment of the parents’ resources in their children’s schooling (Sheldon, 2003). In spite of the fact that the findings may not fully apply to other regional and contextual settings, the study can and does put forward critical insights about the school – refugee parent partnership in the Czech context.

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