Beyond invisibility. Welcoming children and families with migrant and refugee background in ECEC settings

The current international debate widely recognises the need for improving the quality of early childhood education and care (ECEC) for all children and families. This is especially true when taking into account the impact that quality ECEC can have on the wellbeing of children and families with vulnerable background, including immigrant, refugees and asylum seekers.

Although much has been done to reduce inequalities, in terms of significant investment in early years education, nonetheless, multiple barriers to accessing ECEC settings, cultural segregation and discrimination, differences in educational opportunities and poverty still persist. The last-mentioned phenomenon has increased significantly in recent years across many European countries, where families with younger children are at greater risk of poverty than any other group (Eurostat 2019). Children who are particularly susceptible to the hazards of poverty and educational inequality include those from low-income families and households with a migrant background, Roma children, refugee or asylum-seeking children, street children, and children exposed to social risks such as homelessness, violence, and trafficking (Bennett 2012).

Remedies that address the symptoms rather than the root causes of these problems are no longer sufficient (Gordon, Peeters, and Vandekerckhove 2016). The 2013 Communication from the European Commission, ‘Investing in Children: breaking the cycle of disadvantage’, focused on the need to enhance ECEC settings by developing integrated strategies for fulfilling children’s needs (European Commission 2013). The Recommendation which followed is based on three key tenets:

• Access to adequate resources, which implies supporting parents’/carers’ participation in the labour market and providing for adequate living standards;

• Access to affordable quality settings, which requires investing in ECEC, improving education and health systems, and providing enhanced support to families;

• Children’s right to participate, which means supporting their participation in play, recreation, sport, and cultural activities, as well as in decision-making that affects their lives (EUAlliance for Investing in Children 2014).

Despite this consensus at the policy level, children from ethnic minority, low-income, and refugee backgrounds are still less likely than their peers to be enrolled for early childhood education and care and, even when enrolled, are often in receipt of poorer quality services (Vandenbroeck and Lazzari 2013). The paradoxical risk that they will remain ‘invisible’ tends to persist even when they have access to ECEC settings. On the one hand, these phenomena are explained by the many known barriers to participation in ECEC, such as: low socio-economic status including a short-term parental education, low family income or parental unemployment; living in poor neighborhoods/rural areas/marginalised settlements; ethnic minority background influenced by the length of time parents have been residing in the host country and their ability to master the host country language (Lazzari and Vandenbroeck 2012). On the other hand, they are also connected to the fact that migration-related trauma and suffering are becoming a structural feature in many countries. An increasing number of very young children and their families are afflicted by poverty, persecution, cultural conflict, violence, and war in their native countries and obliged to migrate in order to survive and to pursue a better life. Yet on arrival in the host country, they often face additional systemic and cultural barriers. As a consequence, a substantial proportion of children whose parents are refugees or asylum-seekers never attend any ECEC setting. Or, even where this opportunity exists – as the authors of articles No. 7 and No. 8 in this Special Issue argue – gaining access can take months or even years, and ‘we know how much time and years count in the early childhood period’ (Vandekerckhove & Aarsen, 2019). In other words, although these children deserve the same access to care and education as all other children, the practical fulfilment of their rights is (still) often problematic. While the stories of individual children and families reveal the enormous complexity involved in negotiating roles, identities, relationships, goals, and values after crossing borders, they also bring to light the need for us to challenge our own biases and assumptions concerning early childhood education and care, by bringing the voices of migrants/refugees into the mainstream.

It is beyond our scope here to exhaustively review the state of the art in inquiry into these issues. However, research has clearly shown that children with vulnerable and/or traumatic backgrounds (migrants, refugees, asylum seekers) are seriously in need of a safe and healthy environment that is not only free from stress, but also supportive, rich, and educationally informed, and therefore suited to fostering their cognitive, emotional, and social development. It is thus essential for these children and their families to enjoy access to high quality ECEC, both soon after their initial reception and throughout their integration process (OECD 2018). Yet, as the authors who have contributed to this Special Issue confirm, this is still not always the case.

A number of studies have shown that ECEC settings can be enriching contexts for all, but especially for children and families from disadvantaged and/or migrant backgrounds (Eurydice 2009; Park, Katsiaficas, and McHugh 2018). As articulated by the Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC), ECEC ‘can lay the foundations for later success in life in terms of education, well-being, employability, and social integration, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds’ (European Commission 2014).

Yet, as stated in a report recently prepared for the TFIEY (Park, Katsiaficas, and McHugh 2018) by the MPI (Migration Policy Institute), based on the findings from a nine-country study of ECEC policy and practice targeting the young children of refugees and asylum seekers, ‘country-wide responses to the ECEC needs for young refugee and asylum seeker children have been extraordinary weak, despite the legal obligation in most countries to serve this population’ (Park Katsiaficas, and McHugh 2018, 2). Unfortunately, this situation has not varied significantly over the past year. In MPI’s 2019 report (April 2019), two of the same authors (Maki Park and Citlin Katsiaficas) have again observed that countries’ efforts to address the needs of these children and families, and to offer effective and inclusive educational settings for all, especially the most vulnerable, remain inadequate:

[…] despite the considerable potential for ECEC programmes to identify and respond to the early signs of trauma in children, there is a general lack of capacity and training on how to do so effectively among young children of immigrants. Trauma-informed policies and programs designed to support this young child population are similarly limited across other key fields, including mental health care and organizations that support the refugee resettlement process. (Park and Katsiaficas 2019, 1)

Quality ECEC programmes can play a crucial role by offering supportive and empowering communities which, in keeping with a ‘progressive universalism’ perspective, promote social inclusion for all, with a particular focus on meeting the needs of vulnerable families and children, as also recommended in the European Quality Framework for ECEC (2014). ECEC settings today not only need to be more welcoming and quality-oriented for their current users, but should also become more accessible (in the broadest sense, both structurally and culturally) and reachable for children and families who are not (yet) their users. Early years centres need to become resilient communities that can contribute to building up a dominant discourse which recognises the strengths and resources of all children and families. Attaining these outcomes, however, requires a paradigm shift: ‘pursuing social justice through increased capacity to deal with a multiplicity of differences, rather than reducing diversities’ (Vandenbroeck 2009, 165).

As argued by Vandenbroeck and Lazzari (2014), working towards this goal implies investing in availability, sustainability, accessibility, utility, and comprehensibility. In practical terms, we need to enhance the quality of our ECEC settings at a range of levels, and to promote multi-sector and multi-disciplinary approaches as well as culturally sensitive systems.

This special issue is informed by the background just outlined. While some research has already been focused on early childhood education and care and migration, further inquiry is needed to establish how ECEC settings can best be reachable for diverse families and children, communicate with them, support inclusive education, and become sufficiently accessible and culturally sensitive. Furthermore, few studies have specifically examined the theme of refugee families/children and ECEC, meaning that evidence on ECEC approaches for successfully welcoming and supporting this specific group is scarce. Overall, there is an urgent need for collaborative research to make the life of these children and families visible.

The purpose of this special issue is to address these gaps in the literature, by raising awareness of key themes outlined above and offering insights into how ECEC might tackle potential inequalities in our multi-diverse societies. We hope that, by focusing on the relationship between ECEC settings and children and families with refugee and/or migrant backgrounds, this set of articles will advance the debate on how early years settings can function as key sites for overcoming children’s and families’ risk of invisibility.

As just suggested, ECEC settings today may be viewed as facing a bidirectional challenge: on the one hand, they need to develop strategies for engaging and serving (also) children/families with disadvantaged background (including refugee and migrant), providing them with support that can mitigate the above-mentioned risks and barriers and reinforce their strengths and potentialities; on the other hand, they need to achieve this within a ‘non-targeted’ and non-stereotyped framework (progressive universalism) that fosters inclusion for all by valuing diversity, multilingualism, mutual dialogue, mutual understanding, cultural negotiation, and the active participation of all children, families, and communities.

The ten articles featured in the following pages engage with these dual challenges, within a multidisciplinary and plural framework informed by different theoretical and methodological approaches. Each offers interesting insights into one or more of the above-listed themes and lays down a valuable benchmark for further research on related topics. With an emphasis on identifying success factors in meeting the challenges to ECEC – which they understand as culturally situated rather than as rhetorical principles distant from everyday reality in ECEC settings – the articles focus on the main actors (children, parents, staff) in early years education and care, and on their relationships, needs, and potentials, offering clear insight into the kind of support that is required to promote inclusive and empowering practices.

Of the ten articles in the special issue, the majority are research based. However, we have chosen to also include articles that (while in any case based on research findings) are more strictly related to ‘practice’. Indeed, practice nourishes research and vice versa, especially on the theme of how ECEC settings can best welcome, value, and engage with diversity. Furthermore, while little research has been conducted on refugee families and ECEC (as flagged earlier),interesting practices have been emerging ‘from the bottom-up’ and merit further analysis. Our aim here is to raise awareness of these developments and to call for follow-up inquiry in this domain.

Most of the articles are grounded in a specific local and cultural context, yet they are by no means intended to be exemplars’ representing a typically Australian, English, German or any other approach. Rather, each paper may be seen as offering a perspective from the authors’ specific socio-cultural context on the main theme of the Special Issue. A number of articles (No. 1,3,4,5,6) discuss findings from studies that involved children, families, and ECEC practitioners in more than one country, thus offering readers a broader, more international, viewpoint on our set of shared themes.

The first article, by Joseph Tobin – an educational anthropologist who is internationally recognised as a leading contributor to the development of innovative video-based methodologies for exploring cross-cultural perspectives on the education and care of immigrant families [Tobin, Hsueh, and Karasawa 2009; Tobin 2016] – offers an overview of the special issue’s main theme. Tobin revisits (a decade later) the Children Crossing Borders study – his well-known work on how immigrant families and teachers view early childhood education and care across four EU countries and the US [Tobin 2016] – presenting its major findings and putting forward a set of recommendations for addressing the needs of immigrant/refugee children and families today. He lays particular emphasis on the urgent need to encourage policy and practice changes designed to reduce social exclusion by enhancing practitioners’ competences and cultural sensitivity in working with immigrant and refugee families, and thereby opening up new opportunities for supporting co-education with parents, multi-vocal-dialogue and cultural negotiation.

Brecht Peleman, Michel Vandenbroeck, and Piet Van Avermaet, from Belgium (Flanders), in the second article, tap into the ‘black box’ of preschool practice via a detailed empirical study on the verbal interactions of ECEC practitioners with eight children from families considered to be ‘at risk’ (with a migration background and/or a home language different to Dutch). These authors challenge the current assumption that ECEC settings are invariably successful in tackling inequality. The results show that preschools may actually deepen existing inequalities, when practitioners/teachers are not provided with sufficient support and guidance on how to engage with and value diversity.

Articles No. 3,4,5 and 6 explore some of the key themes in the contemporary debate on how to help ECEC settings meet the challenges of welcoming diverse children/families, including those from migrant/refugee/vulnerable backgrounds, based on research conducted in different EU countries. Each of these contributions addresses a crucial issue at the core of the international debate.

Arianna Lazzari and colleagues, in article No. 3, emphasise the importance of investing in ‘positive’ transitions between the home, ECEC setting, and compulsory school education, for all children and families, while paying particular attention to those from vulnerable backgrounds (including migrants and refugees). They explore this theme in light of the findings of a transnational participatory action-research study (START) carried out in England, Belgium, Italy and Slovenia.

Article No.4, by Cecilia Aguiar and colleagues (ISOTIS research team), explores successful interventions, in classrooms, schools and microsystems, that were aimed at promoting equality and a sense of belonging for children and families from immigrant, Roma, and low-income backgrounds, attending early childhood education and care (ECEC) and primary education centres in eight European countries (Czech Republic, England, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Portugal). The results suggest that language support is widely provided, in recognition of the foundational nature of language for learning, communication, and belonging. However, the authors conclude that comprehensive intercultural policies that explicitly support culture maintenance, communication, and positive contact would be of value in guiding future developments.

Katrin Wolf and colleagues, in the fifth article, examine associations between family characteristics (structural characteristics and attitudes towards acculturation) and early ECEC attendance in families with a Turkish immigration background in England, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway, drawing on data from a standardised survey. In addition to context-dependent factors, these authors observed an association between family socio-economic variables and early ECEC attendance across all countries.

Article No. 6, by Clara Silva and colleagues, offers insights into the professional development requirements of ECEC practitioners in multi-diverse societies, based on the results of a survey carried out in Italy, Spain, and Hungary. The findings underscore the urgent need for support and training in this field, with practitioners especially concerned to enhance their relationships with children’s families, and to develop reflexive competences enabling them to think about and question their practice in order to transform it.

These four studies present readers with a range of methodological and theoretical approaches to key issues, extending the possibilities for early childhood education and care communities to enhance their cultural interpretation and practices.

The following articles, No. 7, 8, 9 and 10, complete the special issue by offering a specific focus on refugee families and children and their relationship with ECEC settings, identifying both proven success factors and challenges that remain to be addressed.

Article No. 7, by Ankie Vandekerckhove and Jeroen Aarssen, provides an overview of the situation concerning asylum seekers, refugee families and young children in Europe and their (lack of) access to quality ECEC settings. The paper is based on the results of the Erasmus+ Project ‘MyRef’, (Multilingual Early Childhood Education and Care for Young Refugee Children), which pointed up the general ‘invisibility’ of this specific group of young children and their families in both policy and research. The authors discuss the findings of four country reports, from the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and the United Kingdom, respectively, offering inspiring examples of how ECEC might address the needs of refugee children.

Article No. 8, by Anne Wihstutz, presents an exploratory ethnographic research project in a small number of refugee accommodation centres in Germany. Children from eight families from Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia, were invited to take part in the study with a view to developing an understanding of how they experienced living in an asylum centre. Among the issues explored, the author discusses children’s use and reinterpretation of space and the role of relationships in their lives. She concludes that the study outcomes confirm the need to raise awareness within the ECEC community about the risk of viewing refugee children and their families as over-vulnerable, failing to recognise their strengths in terms of agency and resilience.

Article No. 9, by Cherie Lamb, presents a small-scale qualitative study aimed at exploring barriers and enablers to accessing and participating in ECEC settings for refugee families with 3-to-5-year-old children living in Queensland, Australia. Most refugee families did not avail of quality ECEC, with the key factors driving exclusion being poverty, language, ethno-cultural discrimination, cultural divergence, and trauma. The author highlights the negative impact of systemic barriers, arguing that trauma-informed and anti-discriminatory pedagogies are required to more adequately cater for the multiple needs of children from refugee families.

The tenth and final article in this Special Issue, by Donna Gaywood, Tony Bertram, and Chris Pascal, discusses some of the ethical and positional issues encountered when involving refugee children in research, particularly surrounding the ‘conceptualisation’ of refugees, the narrative of trauma, and the location of positionality. This paper draws on a small-scale qualitative study carried out in England with the aim of investigating how very young Syrian refugee children experienced ECEC initiatives.

Together, the ten articles underscore the potentially crucial role of ECEC settings in tackling inequalities, valuing diversity, encouraging multilingualism, enhancing participation, and becoming resilient spaces for those affected by trauma or difficult circumstances. They offer a vision of early childhood settings as meeting places, where there is room for children and families to be welcomed and listened to, and where social change is encouraged by building up a co-educating community. For this aspiration to be more fully realised, we need to pursue quality in the ECEC sector at a range of different levels, as borne by the CoRe research (Urban et al. 2011; Vandenbroeck, Urban, and Peeters 2016), which suggested that focusing on practitioners’ competences with a view to improving the quality of ECEC is crucial but not sufficient step. We require ‘competent systems’ capable of investing simultaneously at the individual, group, inter-institutional, and governance levels. Today, the leading challenge for such competent systems is to increasingly develop a culturally sensitive and research-based approach with a view to fully embracing the multiple challenges of our ‘super-diverse’ societies (Vertovech 2007). If this fails to happen, too many children and their families will remain or become invisible in our societies, an extremely grave risk that we, as the early childhood community, cannot accept.

Policymakers, researchers, and practitioners should work in tandem to create the conditions for inclusive ECEC settings, as also recommended in the European Quality Framework (European Commission 2014). At the research level, more qualitative/ethnographic inquiry is needed across a greater variety of EU settings to reduce the risk that identifying ECEC centres as ‘key sites for tackling inequalities’ will remain a rhetorical statement, rather than rooted in empirical studies and practices.

We are extremely grateful to those researchers, practitioners, and colleagues who have listened to the voices of diverse children, families, and practitioners. And we are especially thankful to those who have begun to involve children and families with refugee background in their research, obtaining interesting findings that can usefully inform the design of interventions and innovative practices in ECEC settings. However, we are aware that even these efforts are not enough, and the limitations of this Special Issue confirm us in this awareness. There is scope for even greater endeavour in this field.

We hope that the publication of this Special Issue – a first step in this direction – will act as a stimulus to our ECEC community, encouraging further work within a collaborative cross-cultural and interdisciplinary framework, as well as investment in action/participatory research and child/family-centred pedagogical approaches to practice. Directly including the voices of children, families, and practitioners, conducting research with them (and not only on them), valuing their role as co-researchers and agents of change within participatory approaches (Oliveira-Formosinho and Formosinho 2012), are all crucial when we go about innovatively combining top-down and bottom-up approaches to transform practices (Bove et al. 2018), and thereby to foster inclusive and empowering approaches in ECEC (Peeters and Sharmahd 2014).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the authors for the effort that they devoted to writing the articles and revisiting and modifying them based on the peer reviewers’ comments. We would also like to thank EECERA for the opportunity to work together on producing this special issue, and Julia Oliveira-Formosinho, Chris Pascal and Tony Bertram for their guidance and support. Our thanks also to the external reviewers for their rich and valuable contributions. Finally, we are grateful to the copyeditor, Sarina Razzak, for her help with editing and finalising this special issue. Without her help and constant support, this Special Issue would have not been possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.