In recent years we have been witnessing an unprecedented scale of forced migration, with 89,3 million forcibly displaced people (UNHCR, 2022) of whom almost half were children under the age of 18. However, this  group remains overlooked, with pleads by scholars (Suarez-Orozco, 2019) for children to be placed more centrally in the research and policy fields. The present paper will report on a British Academy funded project (2022-2023) that ethnographically documented the lived experiences of  Unaccompanied Asylum-seeking children (UASC)  in a major host, yet under-researched Southern European country, Greece. 

The study aims at shedding light into forced migration through unaccompanied asylum-seeking children’s (UASC) narratives of their lived experiences in Greece. The study’s key objective is to explore unaccompanied minors’ negotiations of agency and structure in their accounts of post-migration experiences.More specifically, it examines their encounters with the host society, their access (or lack thereof) to education and social and health care; their educational and professional aspirations and  plans, and how these are affected by their experiences and responses to open-ended waiting.

The paper seeks to contribute to the growing field of refugee education. As other studies have found, refugee children tend to have interrupted learning trajectories, with irregular patterns of educational participation, often both in the country of origin and in the countries of transit and asylum. According to Dryden-Peterson (2016) key to conceptualising refugee education at global, European and national levels, are the conditions of conflict, the types of schools that are available to refugee children (camp-based schools or mainstream) to attend and the rates of access (Dryden-Peterson, 2016). In an attempt to expand this conceptualisation, it will be argued that the impact of the uncertain legal status is also very important, albeit under-researched (see for a notable exception Homuth et al 2020). The state-induced legal liminality and prolonged temporariness provide the backdrop of UASC’s lives, having an impact of their mental health (Giannopoulou et al 2022) and directly or indirectly on their engagement with the educational process. 

An ethnographic design has been employed that involved two phases of intensive fieldwork in reception centres with high numbers of UASC in Northern Greece. Further, the study, placing at its core UASC as co-creators of knowledge, utilised a child-centred methodology that included observations, in-depth interviews, focus groups with 60 children living in two Shelters for Unaccompanied Minors. Mindful of the ethical tensions and complexities inherent in the empirical study with UASC, the overall research process was conducted with sensitivity, tactfulness and in the best interests of the children involved (Alderson&Morrow, 2020) . In addition to the principles of ‘no harm and distress’, informed consent, anonymity and confidentiality, utmost attention was paid to overcoming distrust and suspicion, with which the research with refugees is fraught (White&Bushin, 2011). This necessitated flexibility and malleability in the research process, whilst enabling the UASC to participate via opting for the methods in the research framework that they felt more comfortable with (Hopkins, 2008). Interpreters who worked in the Shelters where the participants lived and had a close day-to-day relationship with the children were recruited to translate from their native languages. Qualitative thematic analysis was used to identify the narrative-discursive themes permeating the data.

In exploring the role of education in the lives of unaccompanied minors the presentation will unpack how UASC narrate their educational experiences in Greece. Although access to public education for all children irrespectively of legal status is enshrined in Greek Law, in practice the educational integration of UASC is hindered by number of barriers. First, due to institutional, financial and cultural factors the reception of these children in Greek schools has been jeopardized by the chronic lack of funding, under-stuffing and bureaucratic inertia, along with an often anti-immigrant, hostile attitudes and responses by the local communities where reception classes were allowed to operate. A further hindrance to the participation in the educational process is the language barrier, with the vast majority of asylum-seeking children not being able to communicate in Greek, along with the limited opportunities for structured language instruction and the almost non-existent second language education (Crul et al 2019). These findings are keeping with other studies (Dreyden-Peterson 2016) that have documented refugee children’s educational experiences in countries of first asylum and reported the role of language barriers and discrimination in school settings. Yet an additional important barrier that the current study identified is the impact of UASC’s uncertain legal status and the ambivalence it seems to generate towards education. Participants expressed how much they valued education, yet living in legal limbo, awaiting their asylum decisions and being ‘trapped’ in a country, city and a reception facility they did not choose to be make them feel less inclined to invest in the educational process that in turn requires investment in learning the host society’s language. It is argued that further research is needed to explore the educational trajectories of refugee and the effects of their uncertain legal status on their educational outcomes (see also Homuth et al 2020).

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