Throughout history and across regions, human mobility has shaped the cultural and linguistic composition of education systems worldwide (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2024). Reflecting this trend, the share of students with migration biographies has risen across OECD and EU systems in recent decades, leading to increasingly multilingual classrooms (European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice, 2019; OECD, 2018). Consequently, meeting the needs of linguistically diverse learners and ensuring that parents and legal caregivers can engage meaningfully in their children’s education has become a core priority for education systems globally (Martin et al., 2025).

In recent years, research has consistently shown that students with migration biographies encounter substantial barriers to educational success (e.g., OECD, 2018) and that their parents or legal caregivers face obstacles to meaningful engagement in school processes (e.g., Antony-Newman, 2019; Kim et al., 2020). Moreover, research shows that many parents of students with migration biographies are unable to fully leverage the rich resources available at home due to limited information about the school system, language barriers, and insufficient teacher preparation for inclusive family engagement (Antony-Newman, 2019).

While growing research addresses structural barriers reproducing inequalities for students with migration biographies and their parents or legal caregivers (e.g., Öztürk et al., 2025), studies are still needed that foreground hindering factors across system levels: policy (macro), school/organization (meso), and classroom/teacher practice (micro). This symposium advances that agenda by interrogating barriers at each level, including monolingual language-of-instruction policies and administrative hurdles (macro), class placement and tracking (meso), and teacher language ideologies, professional identities, and intercultural expectations (micro), to inform durable changes in education policy and practice.

The first contribution, in the U.S. context, examines in-service teachers’ bilingual perspectives on parental involvement with Latine families and finds a shift from English-centric views to relational, multilingual partnerships. Teachers recognized home multiliteracies, reframed children’s language brokering as leadership, and adopted bilingual practices, while families called for trust, consistent outreach, high expectations, and barrier-reducing structures. Progress was constrained by accountability systems and English-only metrics, highlighting the need for organizational and policy commitments alongside pedagogical redesign..

The second contribution, situated in Austria, examines how educators and parents with migration biographies negotiate parental involvement in the context of German Language Support Classes (GLSC), a policy that segregates language learners. Using Auernheimer’s intercultural communication heuristic, it finds pronounced power asymmetries, constrained parental access to information, deficit-oriented teacher assumptions, and prescriptive language norms. Parents report exclusion but also enact agency by contesting classifications and advocating for transparency and individualized support. Implications point to asset-based reframing, culturally responsive communication, and teacher preparation for diverse family norms.

The third contribution sheds light on the German context and examines whether attending separate refugee classes versus regular classes in lower secondary schools is linked to adolescents’ attitudes about the importance of speaking German. Using longitudinal data on adolescents with refugee backgrounds, it finds that these attitudes are already very positive and remain stable over time, with no meaningful differences between students in refugee classes and those in regular classes. Modeling of change over time shows similar trajectories across both settings, and these patterns hold when accounting for basic student characteristics and academic self-assessments. Overall, the findings suggest strong, resilient beliefs in the value of learning German that are largely independent of short-term institutional placement.

Collectively, these contributions show that durable equity for students with migration biographies requires aligned change across policy, organizational, and classroom levels. Taken together, the findings argue for replacing deficit frames with relational, bilingual partnerships, ensuring family access to information and decision‑making, and monitoring school structures for exclusionary effects, so that policy commitments and everyday pedagogy reinforce one another to expand participation and belonging.

Antony-Newman, M. (2019). Parental involvement of immigrant parents: a meta-synthesis. Educational Review (Birmingham), 71(3), 362–381. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2017.1423278 European Commission/EACEA/Eurydice. (2019). Integrating students from migrant backgrounds into schools in Europe: National policies and measures. Publications Office of the European Union. https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/3f0f2d53-a9a9-11e9-9d01-01aa75ed71a1 International Organization for Migration (IOM). (2024). World Migration Report 2024. IOM. — Current global evidence and historical context on migration flows and patterns. https://www.iom.int/resources/world-migration-report-2024 Kim, Y., Mok, S. Y., & Seidel, T. (2020). Parental influences on immigrant students’ achievement-related motivation and achievement: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 30, 100327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2020.100327 Martin, S., Horgan, D., & Looney, E. (2025). Migrant parents’ school involvement: extent, barriers and opportunities. Educational Research, 67(3), 385–405. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2025.2529240 OECD. (2019). PISA 2018 results (Volume II): Where all students can succeed. OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/b5fd1b8f-en Öztürk, N., Hassani, S., & Schwab, S. (2025). Insights into students’ experiences of social inclusion and exclusion during attending language pull-out classes. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 29(14), 2549–2562. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2024.2367537