User:Savannahmaria/Newcomer Education

Newcomer education is the specialized teaching of refugees, migrants, asylees, and immigrants who have resettled in a host country, with the goal of providing the knowledge and skills necessary to integrate into their country of refuge. Education is the primary way by which newcomers can adjust to the linguistic, social, and cultural environments of their new communities. Newcomer education aims to empower newcomers with a sense of self-efficacy and social integration, as well as giving them the skills to pursue employment or higher education. Newcomer education also aims to help address trauma, culture shock, and other negative effects of forced displacement. Education for newcomers can provide long-term prospects for stability of individuals, communities, countries and global society.

Background
Newcomer education is a need with international implications. The Refugee Convention of the UNHCR in 1951 listed public education as one of the fundamental rights of refugees, stating that “elementary education satisfies an urgent need [and] schools are the most rapid and effective instrument of assimilation.” As of 2019, 149 states were party to this agreement.

There is significant difficulty in obtaining a total estimate of global newcomers. In 2019, the UNHCR estimated a global total of 26.0 million refugees and 4.2 million asylum-seekers. Of that total, 16.2 million applied for asylum in countries of refuge, and 1.1 million were formally resettled. According to the UN, 2019 saw a total of 22.8 million declared new immigrants worldwide. However, irregular or illegal migration may contribute upwards of 20 million to official totals.

Forcibly displaced persons are especially underrepresented in higher levels of education. In 2017, 61% of refugee children were enrolled in primary school, compared to 92% globally. 23% of refugee adolescents were enrolled in secondary education, compared to 84% globally. In 2016, 1% of refugee youth were enrolled at the tertiary level, compared to 34% globally.

Challenges and Best Practices
Newcomer students have a unique set of challenges in the classroom. Newcomers face cultural, linguistic, and social barriers to accessing classroom content, as well as the academic challenges of content comprehension and demonstration of mastery. Host nations are challenged to fulfill international commitments to respect the right to education for all. In order to provide effective education for newcomers, schools must meet a set of broad comprehensive needs as well as a set of specialized academic needs specific to newcomer students.

Comprehensive Needs
Academic research suggests that newcomer students have a set of “comprehensive needs” that must be met as a precondition for language acquisition and academic success. These needs include secure housing, financial support, legal aid, mental health and trauma support, and social and acculturation support.

Best practices for meeting comprehensive needs involve two phases: an introductory period and an ongoing support system. The introductory period includes a robust intake and cultural orientation process. An ongoing support system involves the provision of wraparound services and connections with community based organizations outside of the school context.

Intake involves an assessment of students’ language abilities, educational history, home and family situation, and physical and mental health needs. Schools can improve such an intake process by employing dedicated psychiatric social workers to help with assessments, as well as providing referrals to community resources and following up with families after the intake process is complete.

Cultural orientation to school life includes formal explanations of expectations and requirements as well as ongoing informal conversations with peers or administrators. Orientation is especially critical for students with limited or interrupted formal education, as they may not understand the cultural and behavioral expectations of a school environment. During this process, it is important to introduce culturally specific ways of thinking about education. In the western world, these include understanding the emphasis placed on individual academic achievement and “viewing learning as a foundation for future learning[...] rather than solely as a tool for practical use."

Ongoing support involves the provision of wraparound services, such as onsite physical and mental health clinics, restorative justice systems, college counseling, nonprofit legal services, extracurricular student engagement, and trauma response teams. Often, schools partner with community-based organizations to ensure effective provisioning for these needs.

Academic Needs
Specialized academic programming for newcomers is beneficial to effective language acquisition and academic success. Sheltered instruction, content integration, and flexible scheduling have proven successful in improving graduation rates for newcomer students.

Sheltered instruction involves placing newcomer students in specially designed content classes, typically with smaller class sizes and more instructional support. This approach is recommended for newcomer students with limited literacy skills, especially those with partial or interrupted formal education. Sheltered instruction can also be used as a strategy to integrate newcomer students into formal education for the first year or years of their education, before joining broader ESL programs or general instruction classes.

Content integration combines language instruction with grade-level content instruction in math, science, and humanities. Learning content and language together has proven significantly more effective than learning language in isolation, and has the additional benefit of keeping students intellectually engaged and on track for high school graduation.

Flexible class scheduling and additional learning time during evenings, summers, and weekends allow newcomers with work or family responsibilities to stay in school, as well as providing additional instructional time for students with interrupted formal education.

Funding
As of 2019, approximately 85% of refugees and 50% of immigrants globally were living in developing countries. The Least Developed Countries hosted 27% of refugees and 14% of immigrants worldwide. These countries often have poor educational infrastructure, which provides an additional challenge to refugee education.

Even in developed countries, newcomer education is often underfunded.

Teacher training
Teachers of newcomers require specialized training to manage multilingual classrooms and help students in need of psychosocial support. In six European countries, half of teachers felt there was insufficient support to manage diversity in the classroom. In the Syrian Arab Republic, 73% of teachers surveyed had no training on providing children with psychosocial support. Teacher recruitment and management policies often react too slowly to emerging needs. Germany needs an additional 42,000 teachers and educators, Turkey needs 80,000 teachers and Uganda needs 7,000 primary teachers to teach all current refugees.