‘Not (yet) ready for the mainstream’ – newly arrived migrant students in a separate educational program

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to describe and analyze how school leaders as key actors in policy enactment understand, talk about and act in relation to Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMSs) enrolled in a separate Language Introduction Program in Sweden. Drawing on the work of Stephen J. Ball and colleagues, we argue that a particular discursive formation of NAMSs, operating within constrains of various contextual factors, has a decisive impact on how policy as text is interpreted and enacted. Discursively formulating NAMSs as having multiple challenges, beyond Swedish language and insufficient grades, introduces various barriers. Policy flexibility in combination with power disparities thus allows school leaders, framed within legitimacy of ‘rational explanations’ and ‘affirmative intentions’, to negotiate policy meanings which are not always working in the students’ best interests. Our empirically grounded and theoretically informed discussions showcase why there can be no inclusive education if NAMSs, during a protracted period, are physically, pedagogically and socially separated from mainstream structures. Consequently, and with the support in international research, we call for the overhaul of organizational approaches that allocate Newly Arrived Migrant Students to separate educational forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Key-words: newly arrived migrant students
• upper-secondary schools
• language introduction program
• education policy
• boundaries

Introduction

The education of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMSs) has recently increased in significance among researchers in many countries. There are two principal reasons for this revived interest. First, the arrival of a relatively large number of refugees in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and an ensuing need to find proper modes of organization for reception and teaching implicated the necessity of reforming old approaches. Inadequacy of traditional organization, methods and attitudes emerged, making their insufficiency fully visible and a tangible problem for educators (Carbonara and Scibetta 2020; Garcìa and Kleyn 2016; Juvonen and Källkvist 2021; Shapiro and MacDonald 2017). Second, there is a growing insight among educators and researchers that NAMSs are not just refugees or migrants, but first and foremost children and learners with their own rights to equal and high-quality education, granted in international conventions and domestic legislation (UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] 2018; Dorsi and Petit 2018; Morland and Birman 2016).

Between 2015 and 2019 Sweden, a country of about 10,5 million inhabitants, received approximately 100,000 asylum applications from children under the age of 18. Of these applicants, upwards of 40 percent were unaccompanied minors.¹ Segments of the Swedish educational system, catering for reception, inclusion and learning progress of NAMSs, have been through some substantial reforms in the last few years (Svensson 2019). For example, at the elementary level (age 7–15), among other reforms, a mandatory screening has been enacted, a possibility to partially place NAMSs in separate reception classes during a period of two years has been stipulated, and a stronger right to multilingual classroom assistance granted (SOU 2019: 18).

The upper-secondary school level (non-mandatory, age 16–19) is in focus for this article. NAMSs without sufficient grades that would make them entitled to mainstream programs and without sufficient command in Swedish, are steered towards a particular track, labelled Language Introduction Program (LIP). We address the program in more detail in the next section. Suffice to say here that LIP is devised to prepare NAMSs for further education in national mainstream programs or for continuous education offered by complementary adult education. In itself, the LIP does not lead to any credentials or diploma.

School leaders (principals and vice-principals) in charge of LIP are responsible for all aspects of organization and quality of the entire program. They are also ultimately responsible for a decision when a NAMS will be transferred to a mainstream program. There is a set of national policy, generally defining the aim and goals of the program, but the practical implementation is left at the discretion of school leaders.

The aim of this article is to describe and analyze how school leaders as key-actors in policy enactment (Ball et al. 2011c) understand, talk about and act in relation to Newly Arrived Migrant Students enrolled in a separate Language Introduction Program. Drawing on the work by Stephen J. Ball and colleagues (Ball et al. 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; Braun et al. 2011; Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012; Ball 2015), we argue that a particular discursive formation of NAMSs, operating within constrains of various contextual factors, has a decisive impact on how policy as text is interpreted and enacted. The leading research questions are: What are the main constitutive aspects of NAMSs’ discursive formation that can be discerned among the interviewed school leaders? What is the impact of particular discursive formation of NAMSs on how the interviewed school leaders enact those aspects of the policy that regulate the terms of transition from LIP to mainstream programs? Using insights from previous research and theoretical framework, it is our intention to contribute to the deeper understanding of the educational conditions for Newly Arrived Migrant Students, in Sweden and internationally.

Sweden is an interesting empirical case to explore due to several distinguishing factors: a relatively large number of NAMSs across the school system; a relatively progressive reception and inclusion policy (Crul et al. 2019); the existence, construction and ideological foundation of the separate reception programs at both elementary and upper-secondary levels (Bunar 2021); and a recognition of first language as a vehicle for learning through multilingual classroom assistance (Warren 2016; Dávila 2017; Rosén, Straszer, and Wedin 2017; Rosén 2018).

Language introduction program in policy

The Swedish upper-secondary education consists of two main segments.² The first one includes 12 vocational national programs and six university preparation national programs. In the article we refer sometimes to these 18 programs as mainstream. In order to enroll in any of the vocational programs, there is a grading prerequisite from a minimum of eight academic subjects from the final year of elementary school. Grades from Swedish/Swedish as a second language, Mathematics and English are mandatory. The university preparation program requires grades from 12 academic subjects (including the three mandatory) for access.

The second segment consists of four so-called introduction programs for students who, due to insufficient grades, do not fulfil the entry requirements to the national programs. LIP is one of them, specially designed for NAMSs who: a) have spent less than four years in the Swedish school system; b) do not have sufficient grades to enter national programs and; c) lack sufficient knowledge in the Swedish language. If the students on any of the introduction programs fail to qualify for the national programs, their only remaining option is adult education, where they can take courses and earn grades corresponding to elementary and upper-secondary level. However, for NAMSs enrolled in LIP, a middle-step before transition to a national program can be a possibility of first being enrolled in yet another introduction program.

The number of students enrolled in LIP culminated in 2017, due to a relatively large number of refugees, in particular unaccompanied minors, arriving at the end of 2015 and the beginning of 2016. Around 32,000 students, or roughly 10 percent of all students at upper-secondary level, were enrolled in LIP (SNAE [Swedish National Agency for Education] 2018). Since then, a stricter migration policy with border controls, temporary resident permits and intensified deportations, reduced the number of students to 10,700 in the academic year 2020/21.³ The road towards the imperative of transition from LIP to a national program is rocky. The official statistics (SNAE [Swedish National Agency for Education] 2018) show only 36 percent of NAMSs who started in LIP 2011 and 2012, were transferred to a national program after four years. Furthermore, 47 percent of all students who started in LIP those two years continued their education at adult education programs. For the vast majority of these LIP students, it was a direct transition. In other words, they were never enrolled in mainstream national or other introductory programs (SNAE [Swedish National Agency for Education] 2018).

The national policy governing the LIP program is quite flexible, leaving calibration of its final formation at the discretion of the upper-secondary schools harboring the program. Having a local education plan for LIP; conducting mandatory screening of students’ previous knowledge; producing individual study plans for every student, based on her or his individual circumstances (i.e. what academic subjects, besides Swedish as a second language, the student will focus on, which national program the student is aiming at); and achieving the basic requirements of eligibility, are the four pillars of the general policy (Swedish School Inspectorate 2019). Everything else, including which courses are offered, what support measures are implemented, forms and timing of knowledge control, and the ultimate decision about the transition to another introduction or a national program, is up to school leaders to decide.

LIP as part of the particular Swedish policy landscape has some unique features. However, in the international context, the program could be considered as a pretty common general organizational approach to education of NAMSs, sometimes labelled as inclusion through exclusion (Budginaitė et al. 2016; Vogel and Stock 2018). This approach is based on the idea that NAMSs need to spend an initial period in separate classes or schools (sometimes even labelled as ‘refugee-only schools’, see Mendenhall, Bartlett, and Ghaffar-Kucher 2017), where they can acquire basics in the second language and attain a certain level of knowledge in core subjects, before transition to mainstream classes and schools (Hiorth 2019; Molla 2021; Hilt 2017; Block et al. 2014; Taylor 2008). The initial segregation is thus legitimized by expectations of enhanced opportunities for learning, social inclusion and self-esteem once the students are in mainstream education (Bartlett, Mendenhall, and Ghaffar-Kucher 2017; Mendenhall, Bartlett, and Ghaffar-Kucher 2017).

Literature review

In this section, a part of the international research on NAMSs is accounted for. Thereafter, the presentation of relevant literature is narrowed down to Swedish studies and reports on LIP.

Newly arrived migrant students in international research

Research on NAMSs has recently developed from a main focus on traumatic experiences (Rutter 2006; Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco 2009) and second language development (Baker 2011; Cummins 2009; García 2009; Hornberger 2003; Schleppegrell 2004), to new theoretical and empirical realms. It is difficult to here give justice to the richness and diversity of this ever-expanding research field. For the purpose of this article and given the limited space, this subsection outlines just some strands of research, through presentation of its perhaps most influential ‘turn’: the mounting prominence of the concept of inclusion and its ramification into the areas of social justice and rights, organizational models, quality and support measures, and resilience (Schuelka et al. 2019).

The significance of inclusion for the school success of NAMSs is strongly emphasized in research (Block et al. 2014; Hilt 2017; Baak et al. 2020; Rawal and De Costa 2019) and in reports from supra-national organizations (European Commission 2017; UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] 2017, 2018). However, and given the concept's wide proliferation, it is not always clear what is meant by inclusion and even less how to enact it in practice (Azorín and Ainscow 2020). It is interesting to notice that no matter what organizational model a particular school district deploys, and no matter how conflicting the models are between the districts and even countries, they are almost always legitimized by policy-makers, school leaders and teachers as inclusion (Hiorth 2019; Vogel and Stock 2018; Bartlett, Mendenhall, and Ghaffar-Kucher 2017; Tajic and Bunar 2020). In other words, both ‘refugee-only’ schools (Mendenhall, Bartlett, and Ghaffar-Kucher 2017) and schools with direct immersion of NAMSs in mainstream classes (Grigt 2017; Faas, Smith, and Darmody 2018) are presented as inclusive education.

One of the most pernicious understandings of inclusion is reducing it to physically shared spaces with non-NAMSs (Shaeffer 2019; Riggs and Due 2010). Providing common spaces and having a progressive policy defining inclusion as an overarching principle is important, but inclusive education is much more. Ultimately, it depends on how policy actors interpret and enact the policy (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012). According to Dorsi and Petit (2018, 34): ‘Migrants face various legal, administrative and practical barriers in the enjoyment of their right to quality education, and this even when inclusive and protective laws exist’. Without removal of barriers in form of low expectations, stigmatization, discrimination, racism, and bullying (Watkins 2017; Uptin, Wright, and Harwood 2013; Pinson, Arnot, and Candappa 2010; UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization] 2018), and without high-quality education and targeted support measures aimed at fully developing the personality, talents and abilities of every child (Matthews 2008; Morland and Birman 2016), the outcome is likely to be exclusion through inclusion (Zembylas 2011). Meaning, NAMSs are formally part of mainstream education, but with little chances of excelling in learning and laying a ground for a successful educational trajectory.

Evident in international research on inclusion and NAMSs relevant in the context of this article, is also a ‘turn’ from an almost exclusive focus on shortcomings and the problems NAMSs’ face in destination countries (Migliarini, Stinson, and D’Alessio 2019; Taylor 2008; Sidhu and Taylor 2007; Dolan and Sherlock 2010). Certainly, the individual circumstances are still illuminated and discussed but increasingly also the strengths and resources which NAMSs bring with them. Some of these resources – such as multilingualism, proper educational background, resilience, motivation and dedicated parents – their recognition and utilization, are essential for explaining the educational conditions of NAMSs (Ferfolja and Vickers 2010; Ni Raghallaigh and Gilligan 2010; Kaukko and Wilkinson 2020; Devine 2011; Hamilton and Moore 2004; Isik-Ercan 2012; Koyama and Bakuza 2017; Matthiesen 2015).

Finally, we want to underline an important insight, succinctly and powerfully defined in the literature review by McBrien, Dooley, and Birman (2017, 105):

Research suggests that refugee students continue to experience challenges in countries of resettlement (McBrien 2005), and students with limited or interrupted education (SLIFE) are particularly at risk (Dooley, 2009). However, schools are a critical setting for youth where they are socialized into the new culture and society, and they provide an opportunity to intervene with necessary supports.

Based on empirically driven and theoretically informed analyses, this article’s ambition is to contribute to the expanding international research field on policies, practices and contextual conditions that provide or deprive opportunities for inclusion of Newly Arrived Migrant Students’ ‘socialization into the new culture and society’.

Swedish research on NAMSs enrolled in LIP

One aspect pointed out in the Swedish literature on LIP is homogenization and segregation of its students (Jahanmahan and Trondman 2020). Based on certain policy requirements governing and guarding the access to mainstream programs, a group ‘students in a LIP’ is from the outset, symbolically and organizationally, created in separation from the mainstream. Although the policy stipulates that students must be treated individually (SNAE [Swedish National Agency for Education] 2018), the teachers found themselves overwhelmed with the sheer number of students and the variety of their needs. Consequently, they tend to consider and treat NAMSs enrolled in LIP as one homogenous group of students (Hagström 2018).

Another major inadequacy pointed out in research on students’ experiences of the program is the disparity between students’ aspirations and the program’s slow structures (Fejes et al. 2018; Bomström Aho 2018; Hagström 2018; Bjuhr 2019). As Fejes et al. (2018, 34) report in a study on LIP in a mid-sized Swedish city, the students found the learning and organizational progress to be very slow, they achieved no new results, and they were required to attend the same class for months and even for years. The students expressed confidence in their attained level of knowledge, that would grant them access to national programs, but found formal assessment procedures to be inadequate, unjust, and even wrong. One word recurrent in the above-mentioned research reports is ‘stop’, reflecting students’ experiences of their journey through the program. They are being stopped from excelling in learning and advancing towards mainstream national programs and thereby hindered in their efforts to lay a solid academic foundation for their future.

In the process of interpreting, translating, and enacting policy to local circumstances, LIP appears to have been reduced to the question of boundaries between the mainstream and the separate, between ordinary and side-tracks, and the students’ understanding that it would be better to be somewhere else (Jahanmahan and Trondman 2020). LIP’s boundary generating construction prompts feelings of frustration among NAMSs, and a deep ingrained notion of being stuck in temporality, being stigmatized and regarded as different, less knowledgeable, less ambitious, and less motivated than students attending mainstream programs (Swedish School Inspectorate 2017). Additionally, the absence of relations with Swedish-speaking or non-NAMSs exert a negative impact on their abilities to acquire good Swedish, the all-pervasive goal (Jahanmahan and Trondman 2020; Swedish School Inspectorate 2019). Taken together: separation, slow structures, lack of transparency in regard to when a student is considered as ready for transition to a national program, and lack of relationships with other than NAMSs, lay ground for feelings of exclusion in education and society (Sharif 2017).

Studies focusing on teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences (Sharif 2017; Fejes et al. 2018; Hagström 2018; Bomström Aho 2018; Bjuhr 2019; Swedish School Inspectorate 2017, 2019) have pointed out that the classes are too large and students have extremely diverse previous experiences of schooling (from illiterate to high-achievers). The need for support measures are extensive, but resources are too scarce. Cooperation with national programs is insufficient. Additionally, as the school personnel purported in the above-mentioned studies, students are in a ‘hurry’ to get into national programs, but their migration status (some being exposed to a risk of immediate deportation) and experiences of previous formal schooling makes it difficult to teach and motivate them.

As evident from this brief summary, both students and school personnel express their dissatisfaction with how the program has evolved in the process of its practical interpretation and enactment. Flexibility has been misrecognized as homogenization, the individual approach as boundary generating, students’ aspirations as lack of familiarity with the system’s requirements and preparation for the next educational level as a state of temporality or to put it plainly, a dead-end street. The Swedish literature complements this study’s empirically generated findings, from the point of view of school leaders, with important aspects of the students’ and teachers’ perception of the program.

Theoretical and conceptual framework

… We understand policy as a process, as diversely and repeatedly contested and/or subject to ‘interpretation’ as it is enacted (rather than implemented) in original and creative ways within institutions and classrooms. (Braun et al. 2011, 586)

Drawing on the work by Stephen J. Ball and colleagues (Ball 1993, 1997, 2005, 2013, 2015; Ball et al. 2011a, 2011b, 2011c; Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2012; Braun et al. 2011), the study’s theoretical and conceptual framework departs from the critical analyses of multifarious relations between policy as text and the practices of its enactment. As Baak et al. (2020, 3) remind us ‘policy as text does not necessarily translate to policy as practice’. In identifying the reasons behind this disparity, it is essential to consider the operations of various contextual factors, that affect the policy enactment (Braun et al. 2011).

One example is the obvious power disparity (Cummins 2009; Young and Diem 2017) between school leaders and NAMSs, in terms of who has the priority in interpreting the policy intentions. As shown by Molla and Gale (2019) in their study on how school leaders in a number of Australian schools enact the policy of equity and justice, the school leaders are engaged in situated interpretations where their personal positions and dispositions inform the stances of compliance, compromise, or contest in relation to the policy (see also Högberg, Gruber, and Nyström 2020). In other words, there is a maneuver for social action (Ball 1993) and the school leaders’ agency plays out in the process of policy enactment. Molla and Gale 2019, 864) state that ‘They [school leaders] exercise their agency to make decisions about what is to be done and then commit resources to ensure that their decisions are “realized”’.

Another example of contextual factors is the extent to which the policy’s stated intentions can be negotiated in the enactment processes. How flexible is the policy as text? How much can the policy promoting inclusion be bent and twisted in practice and still be called inclusion? The policy as text does not always contain a set of unequivocal prescriptions that must be followed (i.e. number of teaching hours), but sometimes rather vague or even conflicting recommendations and forward-pointing goals about social justice and inclusion. We recognize, as Baak et al. (2020, 4) argue that: ‘In the interpretation and enactment of policy, policy actors navigate complex and competing demands of policies. They must consider multiple policies and attend to conflicts and tensions that might arise.’ What is interesting though, is to critically deconstruct how this navigation is carried out and how, in our empirical example, school leaders interpret the scarce policy regulating LIP against the backdrop of how they understand challenges and opportunities of their Newly Arrived Migrant Students.

Furthermore, according to Braun et al. (2011, 586):

Policy is complexly encoded in sets of texts and various documents and it is also decoded in complex ways. Policy enactment involves creative processes of interpretation and translation, that is, the recontextualization – through reading, writing and talking – of the abstractions of policy ideas into contextualised practices.

In order to understand how this creative decoding of given policy requirements and ideas in schools’ power infused contexts is organized and carried out, we also need to understand how NAMSs are perceived and defined by policy actors and how this discursive formation interferes in policy enactment. In this aspect, we draw on the work by Ball (2015) who emphasizes that: ‘What counts as school is made up of “groups of statements” (Foucault and Miskowiec 1986, 125) that constitute the discursive formation of the “school” as a neoliberal institution.’ We take this idea and use it as a heuristic device to analyze groups of statements by the interviewed school leaders, that constitute discursive formation of NAMSs. Discourses do not only speak about a subject of knowledge, they also contribute to its constitution (Foucault 1972). Discourse is, in the words of Ball (2015), ‘that which constrains and enables, writing, speaking, and thinking.’ Hence, discursive formation of NAMSs does not just mediate subjective and professional views of school leaders about their students and about how and why they interpret and enact policy in a certain way. It also explains ‘how those statements are formed and made possible’ (ibid.) in a particular context. Discursive formation is a dynamic process that contributes to constitute NAMSs enrolled in LIP in certain ways, which also affects the policy enactment in a certain direction.

Method and Material

The primary data analyzed here consists of seven semi-structured interviews focusing the school leaders’ attitudes, beliefs and practices about the LIP and, in particular, its students. The data was collected within a longitudinal research project, in four upper-secondary schools offering the LIP. As the NAMSs’ social situation is vulnerable we have taken measures to ascertain the NAMSs anonymity during the whole process from data collection to publication of results. This is also why we provide only necessary information about the participating schools and school leaders. The project was also ethically vetted and approved by the Regional Ethical Board.⁴ The second author conducted five of the interviews at three of the four participating schools. The two remaining interviews from the fourth school were conducted by a fellow researcher. Additionally, the second author spent extensive time in the contexts in order to gain in-depth knowledge (Copland and Creese 2015).

The four schools, here called A, B, E and H, are located in three municipalities, in different regions of Sweden, and host a total of 650 Newly Arrived Migrant Students. The participating school leaders had varied scopes of responsibility, but were all responsible for education in the LIP program. The school leaders ER1 and HR2 were responsible for schools also offering several national programs. The others were leaders for the Language Introduction Program only. The school leaders were also interviewed at different phases of the project. AR1, ER1, BR1, BR2 and HR1 were interviewed during the first year. During the second year, however, both HR1 and BR1 had vacated their positions as school leaders, and were replaced by HR2 and BR2, respectively. Also, ER1 had created a separate school leader position for the LIP program only, and appointed ER2 to lead the program. All three vacating school leaders referred to work overload, due to the complexity of LIP, as the main reason for their decisions to vacate their positions or to share their work responsibilities. In fact, only one school leader, AR1, maintained the same position and responsibilities throughout data collection of 36 months. Hence, we interviewed all the principals responsible for the LIP during the whole data collection period.

The data has been analyzed by combining a linguistic analytical approach with in-depth observational knowledge of the contexts during the data collection period. The data has been qualitatively analyzed through the processes of compilation, disassemblage, and reassemblage (Yin 2015). In compiling the data, the audio recorded interviews were made anonymous and transcribed. Thereafter, the interview transcriptions were transferred to a secure internal server at the second author’s university, shared by both authors. To disassemble the data, the interviews were coded into thematic categories representing talk about the NAMSs in relation to linguistically expressed attitudes and beliefs. These thematic categories were thus based on the researchers’ interpretation of the linguistic expressions used by the school leaders in terms of their (situational) semantics in the school context. For example, when BR1 utters, talking about the NAMSs’ resources: Flyktingspråk är ju inte statusspråk (‘Refugee languages are not high-status languages’), we analyze this as an expression that appraises NAMSs’ prior linguistic knowledge as a less-valued asset, both at school and in society. The thematic category label assigned to this utterance was ‘students’ prior knowledge as an asset’, with the polarity option negative. During the final stage of our analyses, the reassemblage, we contextualized the construction of NAMSs and the construction of NAMSs ready for transition to national programs through extracts from the interviews with the school leaders, discussed in terms of policy interpretation, translation, and enactment (Braun et al. 2011). The importance of in-depth local knowledge of the schools was made relevant especially at this stage of analysis. For example, knowing that one of the schools was a reception school (a ‘refugee-only school’) transferring all NAMSs in the end of the Spring term to LIP classes in other schools, made us interpret talk about transition differently from the other schools where transfer could also mean transfer to mainstream programs at the same school.

Discursive formation of NAMSs

In this and the next empirical section, we present selected statements from interviews with seven school leaders. In accordance with our theoretical positions, we consider these statements as constituting elements of the discursive formation of NAMSs. As we are going to show throughout the empirical sections, the conception of a student ready for transition to a mainstream program represents a powerful narrative that affects contemporary practices of policy enactment.

NAMSs as students with challenges and needs

An important aspect of discursive formation of NAMSs, as mediated by the interviewed school leaders, deals with representation of students through the lens of their real or perceived challenges. Some assertions by school leaders are based on observable facts (illness, lack of Swedish), some are ad hoc assessments (children with special educational needs) and some are pure speculations (could be language, learning difficulties or scarce school background).

BR2: Which challenges have I encountered. Yes, to reach out sometimes. A frustration among students when they can’t express what they want to say. You can see they have clear things to mediate, but they can’t get it.

AR1: Last year, we had almost none who were completely illiterate. But we have those who are bordering to schools for children with special educational needs [in Swedish: särskola], we don’t really know. Some students with, how to put it, physical and learning problems, and one with a complicated illness, long-term illness. Anyway, they are here and they struggle and they make progress, but it’s very, very slow. It’s difficult to actually say what the problem is. Is it learning difficulties or is it just the language or because they never attended a school. So, it’s difficult to see it in a short period of time.

NAMSs are further represented as students in need of not just pedagogical and language support, but even in need of love and care.

BR1: And there is a lot of willingness, a lot of love to these kids, that doesn’t always exist at all programs … but there is a large portion of care-taking involved with the students here.

Based on representation of the students’ vulnerability and need of support, the school leaders are questioning the plausibility of the national policy assuming that NAMSs can achieve eligibility for national programs in due time. As ER1 put it:

ER1: As a matter of fact, it’s completely unrealistic to think they can earn grades from all of elementary school in one to three years. Moreover, some might be asylum-seekers and carry a lot of trauma and had never been at school. How could they, it’s impossible.

Despite the mandatory screening of all students, expected to showcase their needs and strengths and facilitate use of appropriate support measures, it is apparent that some schools initially are bewildered upon receiving NAMSs. What does a student really need? Do they need intensive language and subject instruction, a firm focus on learning and progress, aiming at expeditious transition to another (introduction or national) program? Or do they need a slow exploration of their needs and circumstances, paired with care-taking rather than having learning in focus? It seems that the latter perspective is prevailing in practice, although it is justified by the discourses emanating from the previous one. In other words, a form of organizational storytelling (Ball et al. 2011b) is emerging contending that the NAMSs indeed have to work hard to achieve sufficient grades and master the Swedish language, before transition to mainstream programs. Nevertheless, since they face so many challenges, they need plenty of time at LIP and ‘take it slowly-pedagogy’. Evident from the next section is that this approach seemingly clashes with students’ positioning in relation to LIP, demanding a swift transition.

NAMSs as students in a hurry

In the interviews with the school leaders, another important aspect of students’ discursive formation could be identified, representing NAMSs as students in a hurry, which makes them feel stressed and anxious.

BR1: They are stressed out because they know that a very few manage to get into a national program. And sometimes, after just being in Sweden for a couple of months, ask ‘when am I ready, when am I going to move on?’. And that stress can’t be explained away. We can come with as many rational explanations as we want, but that stress and anxiety is inside of them anyway. We have a lot of support measures, from counselling and everything possible with different paths and ‘if you are not ready to apply to a national program, you can do this and that’. We have built up a system to really, to get them to understand that it’s not over [if you don’t acquire eligibility]. But it’s deeply engrained in them. I believe there is also a culture in all that, those who managed to get into a national program are conceived of as successful. They have succeeded in life, while the other ones do not have the same status.

After a couple of months of ‘landing’ in the system, the students are seemingly becoming increasingly aware of their outside position and what LIP represents. Consequently, they are, according to the interviewed school leaders, trying to alter the course of their educational trajectory. As evident from the excerpt, the students are trying to interfere in the process of policy enactment that continuously allots them to LIP. The response they are being met with, based on the school leaders’ interpretation of the causes of action, is located, not in legitimate educational interests, but rather in socio-emotional reasons (‘they are stressed out’, ‘it’s about culture and status’). As such, the students are subdued into compliance through promoting ‘rational explanations’ for why they have to stay in the program, understanding stress and anxiety as caused by the always present ‘traumatic experiences’ (Hayward 2019), rather than practices of policy enactment. Lifting our focus on relations surrounding policy enactment, the extent of power disparity becomes apparent here. The NAMSs seemingly interpret the policy governing LIP as an opportunity, as a leverage to achieving ambitious goals through equality and support (see also Bjuhr 2019; Fejes et al. 2018). In the interpretations of school leaders, the policy is viewed as a broad framework for actions aiming at slowly molding and preparing the students for the next step.

NAMS as resilient students

A third aspect of NAMSs’ discursive formation is the recognition, or at least an awareness among the interviewed school leaders, of students’ agency positioning them as resilient, motivated, and nice as well as a resource for the country.

AR1: So, it’s an incredible resource for the country. Those who are coming here, they have an amazing strength, and they want, they have decided to come here because they want a better life. They want a lot. So, it’s an enormous resource.

ER2: I actually think that many teachers like working with these students. I would also like working at LIP, if I would go back working as a teacher, because they are such incredibly nice students. They are so committed to learning.

BR1: The students are incredibly fantastic. You really get a kick from teaching and you feel that, what you do is important. It has a meaning. It has recipients that so to speak are sucking up everything.

It’s worth noting that while the interviewed school leaders tend to point out the diversity of students’ backgrounds and needs as one of the most conditioning principles for organizing and carrying out teaching at LIP, their representation in relation to the asset discourse (Shapiro and MacDonald 2017) is a general one. All NAMSs are nice and fantastic, all are a resource for the country, and all possess strength. Here, the school leaders are essentially positioning themselves in relation to two general discourses prevailing in the Swedish education system (Håkansson and Sundberg 2012). The first discourse is that all students ought to be considered and spoken about through the lenses of potential success, now or later in life, irrespective of their challenges and learning progress. One simply needs to find the correct match between pedagogy and student needs where we ‘never give up’ on anyone. The second discourse is grounded in rebuffing the previously much criticized stance on low expectations towards NAMSs and the position of ‘refugees as a burden’ and as a problem (Bunar 2021). On the contrary, this position rather embraces a multicultural and ‘migration-friendly’ discourse. Otherwise, the schools would be running a risk of being accused of structural racism and discriminatory attitudes. To underline, we do not question the sincerity of school leaders’ utterances. It is another of their group of statements, defining NAMSs as fantastic, nice and ‘teachable’, that contribute to the discursive formation of not just the students, but also of their schools and ultimately themselves as being supportive, without prejudices and diversity embracing.

An emerging discursive formation of NAMSs at LIP evolves around the idea that they are very nice students, with multiple problems who as soon as possible want to leave the program, which leads to stress and anxiety risking exacerbating their already vulnerable position. This discursive formation affects policy enactment – what the students must be supplemented with in order to be ready for transition – based on a notion that the national policy is a broad framework, somehow disconnected from the reality. The school personnel’s job (here exemplified through school leaders’ positions) is to diminish socio-emotional vulnerability and through meticulous teaching, especially in the area of language development, to thoroughly prepare students for mainstream programs. In order to achieve both, the position of school leaders is that the school personnel need time, they need students to remain in LIP, and they need to resist demands for premature transitions. This last point will be further developed in the next section.

Segregation and boundaries

One of LIP’s distinguishing hallmarks is the existence of various boundaries within and around the program (Fejes et al. 2018; Hagström 2018). Discursive formation of NAMSs cannot be fully understood without acknowledging the operation and effects of these boundaries.

LIP as a segregating program

LIP is by default a segregated and segregating program since it sorts students based on their grades, language and perceived abilities into a separate track (Jahanmahan and Trondman 2020; Jahanmahan and Bunar 2018). This supposedly pedagogically induced segregation is replicated in physical placement of students in schools where LIP share space with other programs. Boundaries become visible and tangible, reinforcing LIP students’ position as being outside, pedagogically, and socially.

HR2: It’s troublesome that LIP has its classrooms over there and the other [programs] have theirs in those buildings, which means they never see each other during the lessons. If they meet it’s during the breaks.

HR2 explains further that even if there is an element of physical integration (the students from various programs share at least the same space during breaks) that ‘I couldn’t argue that it is particularly integrated’, meaning between LIP and students at other programs. In prior studies (Swedish School Inspectorate 2019; Fejes et al. 2018) the organizational and physical separation (own classrooms in secluded parts of a school building) has been recognized as a primary reminder, virtually on a daily basis, that NAMSs are different from other students and that their education does not yield the same merit. The scope of possible social relations has been reduced to other newly arrived enrolled in LIP. Furthermore, the separation undermines the acquisition of the most important asset for transition to mainstream programs, the Swedish language.

BR2 recognized this triple division (pedagogical, physical and social) and decided to do something about it. The first step was to, at least to some degree, overcome physical boundaries by changing the placement of lockers.

BR2: When LIP moved in here five years ago, they were allotted second and third floor, at the end of corridors in that building and they stayed there for themselves. Then, we just did a simple thing, it was the principal of SA [a national program], they had the second half of the second floor, who said ‘let’s change the place for lockers, so your students will have their lockers outside of our classrooms and our students will have them outside of your classrooms’. That did a lot. Just this, to physically move around and make sure they are visible and are everywhere, it does a lot actually.

A subsequent step was to provide opportunities for cooperation between students, something that according to this school leader has boosted self-esteem among NAMSs.

BR2: They work together with other students … Many times, we notice afterwards, there are prejudices from both sides. Our students believe they can’t do anything, but later they realized ‘O God, we did it’. And unfortunately, there are Swedish students [at other programs] that don’t believe our students can do anything either. And then, when we work together, they are like ‘wow’.

The example BR2 invokes showcases that firstly, there is room for social maneuver even when segregation and enclosure appear as the natural order of things. Secondly, they showcase the importance of deploying creative ways of acting when it becomes clear what the current mode of policy enactment entails. Thirdly, they showcase how detrimental the boundaries are for educational success of NAMSs, and fourthly, how the status and views other students hold of them are impacted by boundaries.

HR1 also highlights the need for creating mixed groups, but in this example to bridge over boundaries between students at LIP, ‘otherwise, there will be a segregation among our students as well’. According to this school leader, there is a risk that if students sharing the same first language are congregated in the same groups, they will continue to speak their language, instead of Swedish, which then will impede on their second language acquisition and further delay transition to mainstream programs.

Meanings of ‘not yet ready’

The most efficient practice to transgress these boundaries would be to make sure the students leave LIP as soon as possible. What do NAMSs need for transition to mainstream programs? As a matter of fact, the national policy regulating education at LIP does not precisely prescribe what students need to achieve in order to leave LIP. The policy only broadly prescribes what the students need to enter the mainstream structures: an introduction program (a middle-step) or a national vocational or university preparation program. In that sense, as previously mentioned, the policy is flexible allowing schools to transfer students even if basic requirements with regard to achieved final grades, corresponding to elementary school, are not completely met. Nevertheless, as we are going to show below, the interviewed school leaders give proof of doing exactly the opposite. Not even when a student has gained formal eligibility to a national program, is it certain that he/she will be granted transition.

BR2: No, and we have, even if it is being said they are going to be at LIP, someone is counted as newly arrived for up to four years, so if they are here, we are keeping them. We don’t say, now you can go to IM [another introduction program] or vocational, but, if it’s the Swedish that doesn’t work, we have an agreement with other IM programs that we’ll keep them here.

HR2: My teachers work based on national policy documents and I usually say to students ‘you have to get as much knowledge as possible so you can make it at national programs.’ But it’s difficult, and I see how tough it is for many of the students at national programs. It’s because, yes, they had got grades in Swedish as a second language, but unfortunately, it’s not enough and they face hardships there […] I can say we have, I believe three or four students [at LIP] that formally are eligible to go to a national program, they have enough grades, but they can’t make it at national programs. That’s why I keep them here with us so they can practice Swedish as a second language one more year. But I think, no, that’s not good either, we have given them grades so they can get in, but it doesn’t help the student.

It is visible here how the school leaders’ and teachers’ agency are playing out, negotiating and contesting the formal policy in the process of its enactment, mediated by the discursive formation about what NAMSs represent. This interpretation of the policy governing LIP is questionable, if not plainly wrong. The school leaders appear to be aware of practical discrepancies between the policy and its enactment, stressing that the transition decision is solely based on teachers’ recommendation.

BR2: We want our groups here. We’ve heard, that compared to others we are obviously pretty tough before we send away students with passing grades, but we have tried to make sure that all of our students can make it and graduate from national programs, before we transfer them. Three years ago, we sent away 17, no 19, who made it and got into national programs. 18 of them graduated this spring. And then we felt, it can’t be that we are doing something wrong. Now, we are a little bit cocky.

Based on what principles the schools assess how the learning outcome, in another school, another social-pedagogical context, with another curriculum and other teachers in three years will look like, is not entirely, if at all, clear. In the context of this study, we argue that in this process, the students are stripped of all agency, all capability for interfering in the process (‘I keep them here’, ‘we want them here’, ‘it’s the teacher’ [that decides]) and are hereby subjugated to policy enactment by school leaders emerging as its innocent victims. Even when they live up to formal entry requirements as prescribed in the policy (get your grade and move on), they have been denied mobility due to key-actors’ interpretation and translation of that very policy. Students do not get what they have been promised and policy enactment obscures transparency and fairness of the system.

AR1 is a school leader for a school that only provides LIP. After an introductory period, students are sent away to other schools where they continue either in LIP or mainstream programs. In the excerpts below, the school leader illuminates an additional boundary to cross or rather negotiate away, in some cases. The receiving schools are not always keen to endorse the transition, although the students may fulfil all formal requirements, in particular when it stands clear that ready for transition includes the students with ‘the lowest levels’ of language proficiency.

AR1: In order to be able to send away the lowest levels, in the beginning we could hear: ‘No these will remain with you, because we can’t receive them, we want A-two or B-one students [the higher language achievement levels]’. I’m sorry, I can’t go to Somalia and order exactly that kind, we have those we have and you must be prepared to accept them.

In some cases, the receiving schools even attempt to send back NAMSs to this LIP-school, so ‘they can learn a little bit more there’.

AR1: This year I’ve got a couple of questions, I think from three schools, like: ‘But we must send back these students, they can’t do anything, they don’t know anything’. And you know, let´s see, they were ready when they were here … I said they had arrived in April and they can read and write so according to our guidelines they should be transferred to you and you have to accept them. So, it’s not equal at the next step. Definitely not!

To conclude, in this section we have described and discussed how various boundaries, some rooted in the policy and some emerging in practices of policy enactment, contribute to the discursive formation of NAMSs as students at LIP and as students ready for transition to mainstream programs. The formation takes place against the backdrop of institutionally sanctioned categorization, separation, divisions and segregation. It affects further how the students are envisioned even after they formally gained status as students at mainstream programs. The long shadow of what it means to be NAMSs enrolled in LIP continues to impact students’ educational trajectories.

Discussion

The aim of this article was to describe and analyze how school leaders as key-actors in policy enactment (Ball et al. 2011c) understand, talk about and act in relation to Newly Arrived Migrant Students enrolled in a separate Language Introduction Program. Previously, in the theoretical and conceptual section, we pointed out power disparity between school leaders and NAMS as well as the extent to which the policy’s stated intentions can be negotiated in the enactment processes, as important contextual factors. In this section, we further explain how these and adjacent contextual constraints, especially the boundaries, exert a considerable impact on the nature of relations between policy as text, discursive formation of NAMSs and policy enactment.

The policy as text, formally governing LIP, is flexible, leaving the space for local calibrations. Equipping students with sufficient knowledge in Swedish and sufficient grades in a number of academic subjects are the main postulates and goals of the policy (even if transition is possible without achieving formal grades in all required subjects). The school leaders are thus expected and encouraged to interpret the policy through continued adjustments to students’ circumstances. In the process of policy enactment, as evident from descriptions and analyses in the empirical sections, this interpretation is being affected by the students’ discursive formation. This formation is grounded in a deficit approach (Uptin, Wright, and Harwood 2012), beyond grades and the Swedish language. Having cognitive challenges, not fully understanding that education in mainstream programs is tough and takes time to prepare for, socio-emotionally vulnerable, and suffering from traumatic experiences, are some of the elements. This discursive formation further cements the students’ outside position and shifts the focus from learning and transition (Hiorth 2019; Molla 2021) to care-taking and staying in LIP. Moreover, the existence of various boundaries within and in particular around LIP affects the nature of relations between policy as text, discursive formation and policy enactment. Segregation and divisions saturate the social space that LIP and their students are allocated. They are literally surrounded by boundaries, some visible, some occasionally experienced, and some invisible but highly regulative.

However, the interviewed school leaders have recognized some of the boundaries as problems that must be addressed. Ironically, the main efforts are put into overcoming the obstacles that the schools themselves have created. LIP students have first been physically segregated in their own classrooms in their own corridors, and then school leaders tried to figure out how to ‘integrate’ students from different programs. When the internal segregation threatens to undermine NAMSs self-esteem, and when other students start to nurture negative images about NAMSs, threating fragile ethnic relations, then the school leaders tried to figure out how to create common social and learning spaces.

Instead of pushing for a quick ‘reintegration’ of students in mainstream programs, the school leaders in charge of LIP are displaying a different strategy: wait, delay, do not rush, one more semester, one more year. In this strategy, the LIP responsible school leaders appear to have wholehearted support from those school leaders responsible for the mainstream programs. As evident from interviews, the mainstream programs and schools are also trying to interpret and translate policy, that, to put it bluntly, seems to be: As long as NAMSs stay in LIP, they are not our problem. Policy flexibility in combination with power disparity between NAMSs and school leaders thus allow school leaders, framed within legitimacy of ‘rational explanations’ and ‘affirmative intentions’, to negotiate policy meanings, not always working in the students’ best interests. Students’ compliance does not appear to be an option, but as a compelling rule given ‘little opportunity for obvious adversarial responses to this process of subjugation’ (Ball 1993, 14).

Conclusions

Newly Arrived Migrant Students, irrespective of their migration status, have rights to equal and high-quality education, granted in international conventions and domestic legislation. Nevertheless, critical educational research has for many years revealed the gaps between the policy intentions and their practical outcomes, often at the detriment of NAMSs’ rights (Makarova and Birman 2016). Our empirically grounded and theoretically informed discussions on discursive formation, policy as text, policy enactment, power disparity, and the importance of boundaries contribute to the understanding of how the gap is sustained. Furthermore, the study showcases why there can be no inclusive education if NAMSs, during a protracted period, are physically, pedagogically and socially separated from mainstream structures. In the words of Due and Riggs (2009, 55):

We argue that the education provided to refugee and newly arrived migrant students in NAPs [New Arrival Programs in South Australia] needs to move beyond treating English language acquisition as a requirement to ‘fit in’, and we call for schools with high populations of refugee and migrant students to consider how spatial relations in their schools may be negatively impacting these student populations.

LIP is an example of what internationally has been labelled as ‘refugee-only’ schools legitimized by the ‘inclusion through exclusion’ approach (Mendenhall, Bartlett, and Ghaffar-Kucher 2017). Allan and Slee (2019, 8) have provocatively argued that: ‘Inclusive education rejects exclusion and with it, segregated schooling. Segregated schooling, on whatever grounds, is a platform for an education in social stupidity.’ We, thus, reject the idea of ‘refugee-only schools’ and ‘inclusion through exclusion’, as a failure to critically address a misguided policy, even if its intentions are at the text level formulated in a seemingly appealing way (Feinberg 2000). Nonetheless, as we argued in the literature review section, inclusion cannot be solely reduced to shared physical places between different student categories. It requires simultaneously the removal of barriers; ethos of inclusion (Pinson, Arnot, and Candappa 2010; Block et al. 2014); attendance to students’ individual needs; tailored support measures; and perhaps most important, the restoration through recognition of students’ agency as knowledgeable and resilient subjects (Ni Raghallaigh and Gilligan 2010; Hayward 2019).

A form of policy recommendation emerging from this study, is that LIP and similar programs existing in educational systems across the world, should be rebuilt on new bases. After a brief semi-integrated introductory period, NAMSs should be allowed after no more than a few months to enroll in mainstream programs, where their learning will continue. We are aware that this new order would require expanded in-service training as well as pre-service education in disciplinary literacy (Schleppegrell 2004) for mainstream teachers. We are also aware that this policy of support-based inclusion (Bunar 2019) would not necessarily undermine the current pattern of NAMSs’ discursive formation. Nevertheless, it would diminish the impact of boundaries and practices aimed at preparing NAMSs for ‘ready for transition’ status, that exert a profound impact on their educational trajectories.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) within the project Recently arrived students in Swedish upper-secondary school – a multidisciplinary study on language development, disciplinary literacy and social inclusion, Grant VR-UVK 2017-03566

Notes on contributors

Nihad Bunar

Nihad Bunar is a professor at Department of Special Education, Stockholm University, Sweden. His main field of research is education and migration. He has an extensive publication track record in Swedish and English. He has also served as a special investigator for Swedish government writing a law proposal on the use of first language and language support teachers for migrant children. Nihad has also worked as an expert and advisor for the European Trade Union Committee for Education (ETUCE) and the European Federation of Education Employers (EFEE); Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on preparing training manual for education of refugee and asylum-seeking students; European Commission, DG Education and Culture; Network of Experts on Social Aspects of Education and Training, NESET I and NESET II.

Päivi Juvonen is Professor of Swedish as a second language at Linnæus University, Sweden, and Visiting Professor of Swedish at Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. She also holds a title of Associate Professor in Linguistics from Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research is in the area of applied linguistics, focusing on language contact, multilingualism in education, second language development and language policy and practice. Currently she is the Principal Investigator in the Swedish Research Council funded project Recently arrived students in Swedish upper-secondary school – a multidisciplinary study on language development, disciplinary literacy and social inclusion.

Notes

1. https://www.migrationsverket.se/Om-Migrationsverket/Statistik.html

2. Two additional programs exist. One is labelled Upper-secondary education with national student recruitment, consisting of six specialized tracks. In comparison to other programs, they are small, recruiting 932 students in the academic year 2020/2021 (SNAE [Swedish National Agency for Education] 2021) and offered in a few places across the country. Another program is Upper secondary schools for students with intellectual disabilities.

3. https://www.skolverket.se/getFile?file = 7595

4. Approval 2018/191–31, EPN Linköping.