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Inclusion and Special Needs Education for Immigrant Students in the Nordic Countries

Sat, April 13, 9:35 to 11:05am, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 5, Salon I

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The topic for AERA 2024 is Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action. The call for a global conversation on race, racism, and its redress is long overdue for the world’s largest education research organization. In other words, the call invites to critical conversations around attempts towards inclusion. The call asks us to address considerations that must be taken up in order to adequately support education for all within the various geopolitical regions.

Many attempts have been made seeking to attain educational equity, without success. In 2015, one more major step has been taken globally when UN realised moment towards 17 sustainable goals, and sustainable goal 4 is focusing on ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all (UN, 2022). If we look at the term education for all, there is no doubt that we mean all students and it is about to making sure that no one is left behind (Ainscow, 2021). Moreover, education for all means equity, and for us equity is linked to inclusive education meaning that every learner matters and matters equally.

However, according to Ainscow (2021; 2021a) inequity in education has increased which results in further disadvantaging those with an immigrant background who have fled their country of origin arriving in Nordic countries and other regions. Here, it is useful to remind the reader that striving to embrace equity in education for, all especially in relation to multiculturalism, increased from as early as 1971. There are two reasons for this increase. First, the immigration and integration policies have intensified in the Nordic countries since the 1970s. Sweden was the first of the four countries to develop an explicit integration policy in 1974. Denmark followed in 1998, Finland in 1999, Iceland at 2000 and Norway in 2004 (Gunnþórsdóttir et al., 2018; Torslev & Børsch, 2017). According to the report by Torslev & Børsch (2017), the number of asylum seekers soared in 2015 and 2016 in all the Nordic countries. For example, in Iceland 10.8% of the total population were immigrants (Gunnþórsdóttir et al., 2018). Sweden, Norway, and Finland were among the top five receivers of refugees in all of Europe (Torslev & Børsch, 2017). In 2022 the situation dramatically changed due to war in Ukraine. According to statistic from UNHCR (2022) the number of Ukrainian refugees is approximately 41519 in Norway, 50692 in Finland, 2239 in Iceland, 38538 in Denmark and 50 000 in Sweden. A greater part of those are below the age of 18. The arrival of a relatively large number of refugees, made it necessary to find proper modes of organization for reception and also implicated the necessity of reforming educational approaches (Bunar et al., 2021; Egeberg, 2019; Egeberg & Fulland, 2017; Gunnþórsdóttir et al., 2018; Fandrem et al, 2021; Svendsen, 2021).

Furthermore, labour migration along with continued family reunification and people seeking asylum has largely increased (Torslev & Børsch, 2017). It means that the proportion of teachers working in preschools and schools which have more than 10% minority-language pupils is higher than the OECD global average (The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training NDET, 2019). Despite Nordic countries` attempts to realise inclusion within the educational systems, teachers still see students with immigrant background to be at a pedagogical “disadvantage” (Hilt, 2016). Moreover, there is substantial evidence that the teaching practices adopted for this group of students are often considered irrelevant and inappropriate; and systems still have a long way to go when it comes to social adaptation and multicultural teaching (Goth & Kjelsvik, 2020; Gunnþórsdóttir et al., 2018).

Such inadequacies in teaching practices contribute to the performance gap between minority and majority students (Hilt, 2016; Goth & Økland ,2018). Students with immigrant background face higher barriers and lack sufficiently adapted education throughout their learning journey, which may contribute to a hight rate of dropout from upper secondary education. (Bakken & Elstad, 2012; Opheim et al., 2013; Statistics Norway, 2022;Wiborg et al., 2011).

The OECD (2019) points to poorer education performance outcomes among students with immigrant backgrounds compared to those with non-immigrant backgrounds. For example, in Denmark, of the students who finished compulsory school in 2005, 13% of immigrants enrolled in the general programme had not completed the programme seven years later. For those enrolled in vocational educational training (VET), 62% had not completed the programs withing the same time span. For non-immigrants, the rates were 9% (general programme) and 42% (VET) while for second- generation immigrants they were 11% (general programme) and 59% (VET). In Finland, early leavers from education and training (only basic education) included 14% of foreign origin (18% for boys and 11% for girls), compared to 7% of those from the host population (8% and 4 % respectively) (Official Statistics of Finland, 2020). In Sweden, 59.7% of immigrant students completed their school with a leaving certificate, compared to 78.2 % non- immigrant students (Torslev & Børsch, 2017). In Norway, 19% of pupils—nearly 1 in 5—have an immigrant background, a proportion that has more than doubled since 2004 (Statistics Norway, 2022). The data shows that 45% of immigrant students had dropped out VET, compared to 28% of non- immigrant- students (Torslev & Børsch, 2017).

While some attention has been paid to the multicultural aspects of the educational systems, the implementation of special needs education (SNE) for those students have largely been neglected. The Nordic countries education systems does currently offer students with an immigrant background some special support in education, varying from introductory classes to supplementary language training (Bunar et al., 2021; Rosnes & Rossland, 2018). However, the research conducted so far in Nordic countries on SNE for students with immigrant background have been absent. A few studies point out that in practice those students are at risk of not being identified, or "over-identified" and placed in segregated settings even if they do not have specific difficulties/diagnoses. As such, the biggest risk for this group of students is the risk of exclusion (Bunar et al., 2021).

It's surprising why under the view of inclusion and vision of education for all, countries have overlooked the issue of SNE and have not provided participation and high-quality learning for all immigrant students, especially for those with special educational needs (SEN).

A broad consensus exists that a significant number of students with SEN leave school with no worthwhile academic, learning, or social qualifications. Kalahati et al. (2020) argue that for immigrant students with SEN it takes longer time to get into and complete their upper secondary studies. In addition, learning difficulties, limited linguistic skills, and inadequate support influence the transition outcomes into the upper secondary education stream (Kalalahti et al., 2020). Kalahati et al. (2020) indicate that various educational practices do not recognise enough the heterogeneity of students and can therefore be limitative and exclusive. Olsen (2021) claims that the space for diversity seems to be shrinking. Hausstätter and Vik (2021) expressed similar claims pointing at the increasing tendency of emphasizing human capabilities, and thus marginalizing students with SEN from equal participation in societal activities.

Based on this summary review, it is timely to repeat that ongoing tendencies challenge the core idea of inclusion that guarantees education for all. As such, inclusion and SNE for immigrant students represent a critical social aspect withing a society's social justice with an equalised and active citizenry (Ainscow, 2021). It is clear, that we need to transform our entire educational systems to build an inclusive culture and make education a space where every learner is given fair conditions, where all learn to live together and to value differences and to learn from each other. Therefore, the focus of this symposium is inclusion and SNE specifically for immigrant students, both of which should be seen in relation to each other in the symposium`s context.

It is our hope that this symposium will help reignite conversations about what inclusion is and should be not only in the Nordic countries, but also around the world.

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