Increasing linguistic diversity in education has brought renewed focus to persistent inequalities experienced by minority-language students. However, there is increasing scientific literature which identifies educational interventions that are effective in compensating for these inequalities, overcoming deterministic and deficit analyses in the understanding of the educational trajectories of minority-language students. Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe programme, this study is part of the research remit of the Revers-Ed project funded to identify trends in educational inequalities across Europe and provide scientific evidence of effective interventions that compensate and reverse them over time, with a particular emphasis on transferability and sustainability. Within this context, this paper reports on a systematic literature review that has a dual focus. On the one hand, the review exploits existing international research to map and analyse educational inequalities experienced by minority-language students from a longitudinal perspective, identifying key features and trends. On the other hand, the review also identifies effective interventions to redress these inequalities and considers how they can be translated into policies and replicated to work towards a more inclusive educational systems with better learning outcomes for all. Comparative insights from Ireland are also provided in order to illustrate how evidence-based interventions can promote greater equity.

The importance of considering the complexity of the language context for minority-language-speaking students was a key concern throughout, and focused on indigenous/ethnic-minority-language students (Do et al. 2020; Ja Htu et al. 2023; Nguyen and Ha 2023; Prem 2021); those who speak a minority language in the national context but the majority language in their region (Tang et al. 2016; Zhang 2020); bilingual contexts (From and Holm 2018; Ní Chlochasaigh et al. 2021); and immigrant/refugee minority-language students in host countries, which made up the majority of the studies in this review (Back 2020; Bermingham 2021; Dangping 2022; Karakolidis et al. 2021; Keskin et al. 2023; Kim 2022; Konig et al. 2021; Lindemann and Saar 2012;McGillicuddy and Machowska-Kosciak 2020; Schmaus 2022; Schutte and Miley 2023; Sprong and Skopek 2022).

This literature review addressed the following questions with respect to minority-language students:

• How were educational inequalities operationalised?
• What were the causes or contributing factors to educational inequalities?
• What were the effects/consequences of educational inequalities for students’ lives?
• What interventions were demonstrated to be effective in reducing inequalities?
• What characteristics do effective interventions have in common?

Following the International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews (PROSPERO) framework, the review spans 2000–2023 and integrates evidence from 30 studies across diverse contexts, with a preference given to papers from the previous five years and included longitudinal and cohort studies.

The discussion section underscores the critical implications for policy and practice, advocating for language-inclusive education policies, decolonised curricula, and teacher capacity-building to ensure all students, regardless of home language, have equal opportunities to succeed.

The systematic literature review addressed the research questions outlined in the previous section. The PROSPERO (International Prospective Register of Systematic Reviews) structure was used to develop this review. The keywords used were ‘education’, ‘disadvantage/inequality’, and ‘minority/second/heritage language’. The timeframe was from 2000 to 2023, with a preference given to papers from the previous five years and included longitudinal and cohort studies. The participants in these studies could be teachers, principals, parents, children, or schools; regardless, the ultimate beneficiaries were primary and secondary school minority-language students. The included papers were all published in the English language. Firstly, a search was conducted on Web of Science using the keywords. All fields were used in this search, and consequently, a large number of papers were identified (186 papers). A review of their titles was undertaken, and 15 papers were identified as of interest to this study. Their abstracts and dates of publication were reviewed, and based on these, the number of papers ultimately used from Web of Science was reduced to 12. Additionally, a search was conducted using the same keywords in ERIC. Here, 42 papers were identified, of which seven were used in the literature review. Finally, the same keywords were used in a search on SCOPUS, and of the 92 identified papers, seven were used. There were no duplicates to omit, so a total of 26 papers were identified as suitable for this study. An additional search was then undertaken using the keywords in the Irish context, and four more suitable papers were identified, bringing the total to 30. One of the key selection criteria was the year of publication, with priority given to papers published in the previous five years, of which there were 26. Nonetheless, the remaining four papers were predominantly published within the last ten year, adopted a longitudinal research design and were highly relevant to the topic. The process of analysis included “within-study analysis” as well as “between study analysis” (Onwuegbuzie et al., 2010). The former involved the production and analysis of summaries of the different components of each study (including literature review section, study context, conceptual/theoretical framework, methodologies used, sample sizes, results, and discussion sections). Between-study analysis synthesised and contrasted methodologies used, and findings reported in the studies under consideration. Themes were recorded in detail during the analysis stage following the method of constant comparison.

This literature review highlights the significant challenges that minority-language students face in gaining equal access to mainstream education, and the diversity of contexts that they reside within. Key themes identified include language of instruction policies rooted in dominant monolingual ideologies and rights-based considerations of linguistic inclusion. The literature also highlights unequal distributions of linguistic capital, epistemicide arising from colonial curricula, and the disadvantaging impact of standardised testing on minority-language learners. When identifying both the causes of, and possible solutions to, the named inequalities, the review highlights the importance of not viewing each of these themes as discrete entities. Instead, careful attention should be paid to the significant intersections between them, with themes invariably influencing and interacting with others. In relation to the successful interventions identified, multilingualism and culturally responsive teaching (including translanguaging and dialogic literary gatherings) were identified as central to their efficacy and impact. Critically, and in marked contrast to the monolingual approach, they all bestow value on the minority languages, associated cultures, and prior knowledge of students. Additionally, to offset the inequality these students experience in converting their linguistic capital, affirmative action policies have reaped positive results. Beyond this, the need for targeted continuous professional development of teachers, appropriate changes to ITE programmes, and increased resource allocations were consistently identified as integral to the success of interventions. While comparative insights from the Irish education system reveal broad overlaps with the international literature, cumulatively the Irish interventions speak to the importance of targeted and evidence informed interventions in achieved results in reversing the educational inequality experienced by minority-language students. The review’s findings also point to the critical importance of taking the multifarious and individual needs of students into account when considering policy and practice responses to educational inequality experienced by minority-language students.

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