Education plays a crucial role in shaping the lives of children and youth, providing them with a meaningful, integrative and productive foundation that positively impacts their social engagement, health and overall well-being. However, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted this essential aspect of development as schools closed and transitioned to digitally-based homeschooling. While this situation affected all students, it posed additional challenges for many children and youth from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds(CYRAS) (Fazel et al., 2012).

Throughout the pandemic, people from forced migration backgrounds were specially labeled as ‘hard to reach’ by health authorities, and they were more severely affected by the virus compared to other groups (Diaz, 2021; Orderud et al., 2021). Despite these challenges, there is a lack of studies or evidence examining whether special educational interventions were implemented for CYRAS or how the pandemic impacted their education in the Nordic countries (Baker et al. 2018). Therefore, it is crucial to investigate whether official strategies were in place and how the Nordic countries addressed the educational needs of CYRAS during and after the pandemic.

Our study aims to describe and compare official strategies, including policy documents, guidelines, and prescriptions at national and regional levels for disseminating information and implementing measures targeting children, youth, and families during and after the pandemic, across the participating countries.

The study draws inspiration from trace ethnography. This design involves tracking the implementation of timelines and life cycles of policies and guidelines, reports and evaluations. Documents will be identified through searches on government and regional authorities’ web pages. We will include reports, evaluations, guidelines and policy documents pertaining to information dissemination for CYRAS and the impact of the pandemic on their education and psychosocial well-being. An essential aspect is to identify the timeline of policy and guidelines implementation and dissemination.

We expect the study to deepen our knowledge and understanding of 1) How the different Nordic countries have implemented and disseminated information about the pandemic for the CYRAS; 2) the presence or absence of policies and guidelines specially for CYRAS; 3) Possible differences in the pandemic’s impact between various groups of CYRAS; and 4) Possible contextual differences in the four Nordic countries. In addition, based on the study findings, we expect the study to contribute to the literature on how diverse approaches can potentially address the education and overall well-being of CYRAS in the face of future pandemics and crises.

Baker, S., Ramsay, G., Irwin, E., & Miles, L. (2018). ‘Hot,’ ‘Cold’ and ‘Warm’ supports towards theorising where refugee students go for assistance at university. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1332028 Diaz, E. (2021). Covid-19, vaksiner og innvandrere. Tidsskrift for Den norske legeforening 2, doi: 10.4045/tidsskr.21.0879 Fazel, M., Reed, R. V., Panter-Brick, C., & Stein, A. (2012). Mental health of displaced and refugee children resettled in high-income countries: risk and protective factors. The Lancet, 379(9812), 266-282. Orderud, G. I., Ruud, M. E., Wiig, H., & Tronstad, K. R. (2021). Covid-19: informasjon, etterlevelse og vaksinasjon blant innvandrere–en kunnskapsoppsummering. OsloMet. https://oda.oslomet.no/oda-xmlui/bitstream/handle/11250/276180 9/2021-11.pdf? sequence=1&isAllowed=y