Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, approximately 75,000 people have fled from Ukraine to Switzerland (SEM, 2023), including a large number of children and youths of school age. In addition to refugees from Ukraine, families with children from other areas of crisis are increasingly seeking refuge in Switzerland. This poses major challenges not only to the refugees themselves, but also to schools and teachers. Most children and youths with a refugee background are confronted with additional challenges – they not only have to settle into a new social and cultural context, but also face burdens such as grief, trauma, and precarious residence status.

Although the phenomenon of families with children of school age seeking asylum in Switzerland has been experienced repeatedly, and subsequently large numbers of refugee children have been enrolled in schools, concepts on how to react to this situation were slow to emerge, and the measures taken by the cantonal authorities were rather small scale and pragmatic (see Truniger, 2018).

The group of refugee pupils is very diverse, the children and young people come from different educational backgrounds and due to the flight, in some cases their educational biographies have been interrupted for months or even years. While refugees from Ukraine “are granted protection status S” (SEM, 2023) after their arrival in Switzerland, those seeking asylum from other countries of origin must undergo an asylum procedure (see SEM, 2022). As a result the families from other countries than Ukraine are accommodated in various collective accommodation and subsequently have to experience several involuntary changes of residence and school even after arriving in Switzerland. In contrast, the enrolment and schooling of refugee children from Ukraine (with protection status S) is more continuous: they are assigned directly to a municipality and are enrolled there either in a regular class or in a separate offer. In Switzerland, the right to education is guaranteed in both the Federal Constitution and the UN CRC, which has been ratified for more than thirty years meanwhile.

In the paper, firstly, I will analyse the question of how school as an institution deals with children and youths of refugee background and whether the right to education is successfully applied.

Secondly, I will examine the enrolment practices in concrete terms and how the right to education is implemented.

Thirdly, the paper will address challenges experienced by families and teachers when refugee children and youths attend school.

The paper is based on empirical data which I collected as a part of the ethnographically oriented research project “Education for Refugee Children – Opportunities and Challenges regarding Inclusion in the Swiss Education System”. The project is supported by the Zurich University of Teacher Education Research Fund. The fieldwork has started by the end of February 2022, just after the beginning of the war in Ukraine. With a 'multi-sited ethnography' (Aden, 2019; Marcus, 1995), refugee families, children and youths are accompanied according to the method of participant observation during the school enrolment process and their ongoing school experience. In addition, narrative or semi-structured interviews (Breidenstein et al., 2013; Lueders, 2000) are conducted with families (children and parents) as well as class teachers and other school personnel. Furthermore, the paper is based on current research about schooling of refugee children as well as the recommendations by the cantonal governments of how to include refugee children and youths in schools in Switzerland. The ethnographic data is analysed with grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1996).

From an individual perspective, school enrolment of refugee children seems to work mostly according to the legal framework with most children starting school some days or weeks after their arrival in Switzerland, nonetheless children and their families face great challenges such as barrier of language, integration in an unfamiliar school system as well as a new social and cultural context. Still, from an institutional point of view, the great number of Ukrainian refugees coming to Switzerland in spring 2022 revealed weak spots within the education system such as the cantons or local authorities not always being able to grant access to education within an adequate period of time. The data show that practices of teaching refugee children vary from municipality to municipality and from canton to canton. The time it takes for refugee children and youths to start school differs as well. Enrolment can take place in a separate class or, in an more inclusive manner, in a regular class. According to the refugee families, the uncertainty regarding their residence status is a major challenge. Some teachers can handle the situation and integrate newly arrived pupils competently, others are struggling and complain about the lack of support by the administration.

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