What is ‘fair’ and ‘just’ in refugee education? How teachers and school leaders negotiate competing discourses of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’ in Australia

ABSTRACT

With increasing numbers of students from refugee backgrounds, many Australian schools are struggling to minimise the educational disparity between refugee students and their same age peers. Faced with diverse needs and limited resources, educators must decide whether to distribute targeted resources equally, ensuring all students are given equality of opportunity, or allocate resources to those who need it most, attaining equity of outcome. In this paper, we use data from seven Australian secondary schools identified as examples of ‘good practice’ to explore how educators navigate notions of ‘fairness’ to support students from refugee backgrounds. Findings suggest educators struggled to navigate the tension between providing an equal or equitable response, and often these struggles were inextricably tied to student and funding contexts. In under-resourced settings, teachers weighed up seemingly competing forms of disadvantage, frequently opting to distribute resources in a way which favoured equality of opportunity. Contrastingly, in schools with less disadvantage and higher levels of funding, resources were redistributed based on need, striving for more equitable outcomes for refugee students. The findings demonstrate the complex negotiations that educators undertake when allocating resources and consider how these processes align with, or in some cases contradict, notions of fairness and social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee education
• inclusion
• equity
• equality
• social justice

Introduction

Understanding how to support students from refugee backgrounds is a pressing issue for schools given the increasing number of children and young people being displaced from their country of origin (Miller, Ziaian, and Esterman 2018). The prevailing educational discourse on supporting refugee students focuses on their deficits, including limited English language skills, experiences of trauma, disrupted schooling, or cultural isolation, and the challenges these issues pose for educators (Wrench et al. 2018). Yet this approach neglects the diversity of experiences and skills that children and young people from refugee backgrounds bring. Socially just practices, which seek to increase participation and minimise educational disparity, offer a counter-point to the problem focused ways in which schools support refugee students (Keddie 2012). However, little research has examined how schools develop such practices, or their capacity to do so, when faced with limited resources and a high level of student need. This study empirically examines how schools enact justice through a consideration of students from refugee backgrounds as a particular equity group.

Although all schools have access to dedicated funding to promote refugee students’ English language proficiency, competing forms of disadvantage in under-resourced schools mean educators are often faced with the difficult dilemma of choosing how to distribute resources in the fairest way. Where the needs of refugee and non-refugee students converge, for example in relation to intensive language and literacy support, educators must determine whether resources targeted for refugee students are used to support English language development across the school more broadly, thus ensuring equality of opportunity, or allocating those resources only to refugee students to enable more equitable outcomes. Debates around how resources can be best used to support refugee students are complex, invoking justifications of fairness and justice, structured around the rhetoric of ‘equity’ and ‘equality’. These ideas have been extensively explored through frameworks of social justice such as Fraser’s (1995, 1998, 2001, 2007) ideas of social justice as redistribution, recognition and representation and Gale’s (2000) categorisations of social justice in terms of retribution, recognition and redistribution. This article builds on this theoretical work through an empirical study of the negotiations of school leaders and staff enacting social justice work in complex settings. Our data suggest that the main ways in which schools are considering social justice in relation to students from refugee backgrounds is through the lens of resource redistribution.

In this article, we examine the work of the schools through the lenses of equity and equality. Espinoza (2007, 345) defines these as:

The ‘equity’ concept is associated with fairness or justice in the provision of education or other benefits, and it takes individual circumstances into consideration, while ‘equality’ usually connotes sameness in treatment by asserting the fundamental or natural equality of all persons.

In under-resourced schools with high proportions of refugee students, their limited funding and fewer educational assets, compounded by the parallel and complementary needs of multiple groups of at-risk students, means that educators often face moral and ethical dilemmas in deciding which of these approaches is fairest. In this article we illustrate how levels of resourcing influence educators’ decisions to use an ‘equity’ or ‘equality’ rationale to justify how they support students from refugee backgrounds.

Refugees and the Australian context

Internationally, over 89 million people are currently displaced from their homes (United Nations High Commission for Refugees 2022), with the number of people seeking asylum being higher than ever before. Because of its geographical location and strict immigration regulations, a majority of refugees entering Australia do so through the Humanitarian Entrant programme. Having been recognised as refugees in a country of initial asylum and identified for resettlement, on arrival in Australia they are eligible to become permanent residents. In the 5-year period spanning 2015–2020 approximately 87,700 people from refugee backgrounds were resettled in Australia under this programme (Department of Home Affairs 2021).

Pre- and post-migration experiences of refugee children and young people have been linked to a diverse range of educational and socioemotional needs (Taylor and Sidhu 2012). As Coventry et al. (2002) contend, ‘political, religious or inter-cultural violence’, persecution, discrimination and oppression can lead to refugee students experiencing ‘a state of fearfulness’, and uncertainty about where they fit in. In transitioning to a new country, refugee students must contend with poverty, cultural isolation and racism or discrimination (Taylor and Sidhu 2012), but can also struggle academically as a result of limited English language skills, missed or interrupted schooling, and unfamiliarity with Western curricula and pedagogic approaches (Abou-Khalil et al. 2019; Arnot and Pinson 2005; Hek 2005). Notably, school completion rates for refugee students are significantly lower than for other Australians (Correa-Velez et al. 2017).

How schools support students from refugee backgrounds

In considering how schools can best support refugee students, whole school approaches, in combination with targeted activities, such as the provision of linguistic and socioemotional support, have been identified as key practices in supporting the academic achievement, inclusion and wellbeing of students from refugee backgrounds (see for example Arnot and Pinson 2005; Block et al. 2014; Pinson and Arnot 2010; Taylor 2008). The efficacy of these practices is contingent on a range of factors including staff attitudes (Abkhezr, McMahon, and Rossouw 2015; Rutkowski, Rutkowski, and Engel 2014) and parent and community engagement (Block et al. 2014; Reynolds and Bacon 2018), however, the quantity and quality of resourcing provided to schools also plays a key role in determining their capacity to effectively address the needs of refugee students (Miller, Ziaian, and Esterman 2018).

As part of the agreed Commonwealth Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), all Australian schools are provided with a combination of federal and state government funding to ensure they can offer a ‘high-quality and equitable education for all students’ (Australian Government Department of Education, Skills and Employment (AGDESE) 2021). The SRS consists of two elements: a base amount and six additional loadings which relate to students with disabilities, low English language proficiency, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, socio-economic disadvantage, school location, and school size (AGDESE 2021). In relation to funding the education of students from refugee backgrounds, the SRS potentially provides additional loadings beyond the base amount due to low English language proficiency, and socio-economic disadvantage.

Resource distribution: A question of fairness?

It is at this intersection that we situate the present research, by considering how schools support students from refugee backgrounds in relation to their particular contexts. As Windle (2017) notes, while a small proportion of refugee students receive scholarships to attend private institutions, the majority enrol in the closest and/or most convenient public school. These schools, often in areas with a high level of socio-educational disadvantage, and sizeable populations of ‘at-risk’ students, including those from EALD and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, are often under-resourced and ill-equipped to meet the wide range of refugee students’ needs (Reid 2019, 70). Although additional SRS funding received in relation to the areas of identified need can provide a significant boost to the school’s resources, this funding is only loosely allocated towards a particular group – thus while refugee students are eligible to receive additional support as part of the EALD loading, no guidance is provided about how this should be used, or indeed what proportion should be allocated towards refugee students specifically. The individual context of the school therefore plays a critical role in determining how provisions intended to support the needs of refugee students are distributed (Molla and Gale 2019)

The distribution of resources has played a central role in models of social justice (Wang 2016). Rawls (1971) contends that, as a form of fairness, justice is contingent on both liberty and the equal distribution of resources, offering an equality of sameness but also an equality of opportunity. Other models consider social justice from the perspective of complex equality, where resources are recognised as having different values for different groups, which in turn has given rise to the consideration of equity (Gale 2000). Fraser (2007) posits that, along with recognition and representation, the equitable (re)distribution of resources is central to achieving social justice in education. This article, drawing on the data from the schools, focuses largely on how schools navigate this redistribution. This is not to say that there are not implications for recognition and representation, including ‘lack of cultural/symbolic recognition’ and ‘linguistic/social misrepresentation’ (Wang 2016, 323) but those are not specifically the focus of this article.

In schools with multiple and complex forms of disadvantage, the limited availability of resources compels educators to make the ‘critical decision’ of who needs it most (Molla and Gale 2019). In effect, this becomes a question of deciding whether to allocate resources equally, to benefit all, or equitably, to benefit those with the greatest need. To put this into context, both refugees and non-English speaking migrants are eligible to receive the same level of additional SRS funding as part of the EALD loading. However, while those who come with their families on skilled migrant visas from countries such as China, India and Sri Lanka, may only require English language support, refugee students may require assistance in other areas, for example counselling, catching up on educational gaps or financial aid. The lack of specificity over how funding should be spent means that educators face the tricky dilemma of weighing up the needs of refugee students against other groups of students with similar, yet distinct needs when deciding how resources can be utilised most effectively, a critical decision which Molla and Gale (2019) argue is not only dependent on the level of resources available, but also the institutional ethos and personal dispositions of the school leaders.

As Frønes et al. (2020) explain, equality and equity sit in tension with one another in that ‘equity rests on the idea of distributive justice, while equality is situated within procedural justice’. In fact, the two positions present a direct contrast when considering that, by necessity, equity demands the unequal distribution of resources. In weighing up how to distribute resources in the fairest way, educators must contend with this moral and ethical dilemma. Allocating resources equitably on the basis of need invokes judgements about who needs them most, requiring educators to employ subjective and sometimes flawed or inaccurate understandings of students’ levels of need. Conversely, equality ensures that all students are offered the same level of opportunity, avoiding subjective judgements, but at the risk of neglecting or overlooking particular needs. Frønes et al. (2020) argue that ‘because students are different both individually and in the type and amount of resources they have obtained’ an equitable approach offers the fairest outcome. This approach can overlook aspects of recognition and representation that ‘assures justice for difference along the dimensions of nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexual orientation’ (Wang 2016, 327). However, what is particularly interesting is how schools negotiate and weigh the varying aspects of ‘difference’ when faced with only limited resources and a complex cohort of disadvantaged students who present parallel and complementary needs.

Methodology

The research reported in this paper was conducted as part of a larger Australian Research Council Linkage funded project entitled ‘How schools foster refugee student resilience’. The project aims to investigate how schools transcend the past life experiences of students from refugee backgrounds by creating the social and educational conditions that enhance resilience. It focuses on the policies, practices, relationships, and events that shape the schooling experiences of students. The present study extends from Stage 2 of the project, which collected data from a selection of seven case study secondary schools in two Australian states, to examine how school leaders interpreted and enacted federal and state polices when developing school policies and practices to support students from refugee backgrounds.¹

In consultation with project partners, a series of quality criteria derived from Rutter’s (2006) study of ‘good practice’ in refugee education were developed to guide the identification of potential schools. These criteria included: employing an inclusive, whole school approach to refugee education; promoting an inclusive, refugee friendly, positive school ethos; using structured but flexible induction processes for students from refugee backgrounds; providing practical, ongoing English language support, and; actively promoting anti-racist policies. With guidance from various education sectors, as well as advice from community groups working with students from refugee backgrounds, 12 schools were identified as meeting some or all of the quality criteria. Of these, seven schools, spanning both government and Catholic education sectors in two Australian states agreed to participate in the research.

Policy development and enactment processes related to the education of refugee background students were investigated using what Knoblauch (2005) calls a ‘focussed ethnography’ approach characterised by relatively short term but data intensive visits to participating schools. In contrast to more ‘conventional ethnographies’, this approach limited the time, and hence potential disruption, caused by the research team during the field trips, yet still generated a large amount of data which required intensive analysis. The approach involved ‘walking alongside’ interactive ‘tours’ with leaders of each school, and semi-structured interviews with 51 school leaders, teachers and staff across all sites. Interview participants were identified during initial discussions with school leaders to locate staff members with relevant knowledge and experience of students from refugee backgrounds. Additional data were collected from policy texts, informal discussions, and the school physical environment.

Semi-structured interviews were guided by a mind map which enabled participants to discuss and reflect on various points of focus that resonated with them. Topics included the types of policies that were important for students from refugee backgrounds, the role of policy actors in developing and implementing these policies, the process of policy development, and the practicalities or issues the school had faced in supporting students from refugee backgrounds. Interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim by a professional transcription company. Reflexive thematic analysis was undertaken drawing on approaches advocated by Braun and Clarke (2012). Firstly, transcripts were read, discussed and reread by the research team to generate a set of initial codes. From these, a thematic coding framework was developed using NVivo 12 to organise codes into a collection of themes and sub-themes which were then reviewed for relevance and conceptual clarity. All data and coding were refined and revised following intensive discussions between the research team to ensure the framework presented a comprehensive and accurate portrayal of the data.

Findings & discussion

Negotiating equitable and equal responses

Despite all of the schools who participated in the research having been identified as leaders in refugee education, approaches towards supporting students from refugee backgrounds differed considerably across sites. Factors such as community disadvantage and the demographic makeup of the student cohort all played a key role in determining both the level of resources available to the school, but also the way in which these resources were distributed. Touring the participating schools enabled us to gain firsthand insights into the obvious markers of socio-economic disadvantage and advantage – poorer schools’ location in post-industrial (‘rustbelt’) suburbs (Thomson 2002) with catchment areas featuring high levels of social housing and welfare dependence, overcrowded classrooms and play spaces, poorly maintained buildings and surrounding school grounds, and evidence of racially and culturally diverse student cohorts. These observations were in contrast with the visible signs of socio-economic advantage in schools with above average ICSEA scores. Hard data from official government sources (e.g. the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s My School website) confirms resourcing disparities between high-SES and low-SES schools. As Reid notes,

It is more than coincidental that there are significant differentials between high-SES and low-SES schools in funding, learning resources, facilities, and class sizes. The OECD estimates that Australia has the fifth-largest resource disparity between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged schools (OECD 2013, 2016). It is hard to believe that we have reached the stage in Australian education where schools with the greatest challenges are given the least amount of resources to deal with them. (Reid 2019, 29)

Given the centrality of these contextual factors towards understanding how schools chose to support refugee students, we present the findings by considering the results across two different school contexts (see Table 1: Overview of participating schools).

Table 1. Overview of participating schools.

	Year Levels	Enrolments (approx.)	ICSEA* Value	ICSEA percentile (approx.)	% of students in lowest ICSEA quartile	% of students with language background other than English
School A	7–12	1300	850–900	<10	70–80%	70–80%
School B	8–12	1150	850–900	<10	70–80%	20–30%
School C	7–12	1820	900–950	20	40–50%	20–30%
School D	8–12	1350	950–1000	35	40–50%	50–60%
School E	7–12	800	900–950	20	50–60%	60–70%
School F	7–12	1200	1050–1100	80	0–10%	10–20%
School G	R-12	450	1000–1050	50	20–30%	0–10%

*The ICSEA scores and percentages of students are intentionally kept approximate to keep the schools anonymous. Data in this section is sourced from the MySchool website.

The first context considers five secondary schools with diverse student cohorts who could be considered among the more disadvantaged within Australia. Two of these schools (School A and School B) possessed an Index of Socio-Educational Advantage (ICESA) score of less than 900, placing them in the most disadvantaged 7% of all schools nationwide, while the remaining three schools (Schools C, D & E) had scores in the mid-900s, below the national average of 1000. Collectively, the proportion of students within the lowest quartile of socio-educational advantage ranged from around 45% in School D to approximately 75% in Schools A & B, and combined with this high level of disadvantage, each possessed complex, yet differing student cohorts. For example, in School A, approximately 75% of all students spoke a language other than English, while in Schools B & C, over 20% of all students spoke a language other than English.

Collectively, this group of schools used similar approaches to supporting the needs of refugee students – one that prioritised the equal distribution of funding and resources on the basis that the majority of their students faced some form of disadvantage, whether through being a refugee, speaking a language other than English or coming from a low socio-economic background. In talking to educators, it was clear that while the needs of refugee students were different to the rest of the student cohort, they were perceived as being equal to, rather than greater or lesser than those of other students. As the Principal of School B explained:

[T]here’s a real connectivity between students, no matter what their background is … if you look across our entire demographic within the school, by and large you’ll find students everywhere that have some type of difficulty or challenge that they’re trying to overcome. And as a result of that you don’t get divisions between kids … [T]here’s a real affinity and understanding between our students that everyone is in the same boat, even though we might be different and issues are different, we’ve all got them. (James, Principal, School B)

Decisions about how to distribute resources were informed from a perspective of shared disadvantage, whereby educators would ‘provide equal assistance to every student’ (Imelda, EALD Coordinator, School D). Thus, the challenge of supporting a refugee student was considered in the same way as supporting a student with a disability, and accordingly, resources were distributed across the whole school cohort, even if this meant targeted funding was repurposed to meet the school’s broader needs:

At a school like ours, we have significant funding that comes through our disadvantaged line and we use a lot of that funding to actually staff the school differently, in order to provide an indirect, not a direct necessarily, but an indirect support for students in the school. (James, Principal, School B)

In taking an ‘equal’ approach that ‘connotes sameness in treatment’ for all (Espinoza 2007, 345), these schools justified the redistribution of targeted funding on the basis that the resources they had were insufficient to fulfil the needs of every student. Through spreading them more evenly, all students were offered the same level of support, even if this meant specific needs would go unmet. Consistent with Keddie (2012), these schools were ‘constrained by the inadequacies of their resources’, adopting a more equal approach since they lacked the capacity to cater for the specific needs of refugee students while also addressing the competing needs of the rest of the student cohort.

Interestingly, while the equal distribution of resources meant that the particular needs of some groups, including refugee students, were not being met, several school leaders were quick to point out the benefits of this approach in creating a more inclusive learning environment:

I have worked in a number of different schools and this is one of the few schools I have worked in where kids are as harmonious as they are. There is none of that cultural polarisation. (Meredith, Principal, School D)

We are the school that cares, that people come and feel welcome and never feel alienated by background or anything and we’re, we’re all equal in that sense. And the opportunities that are put out there are for everybody and nobody will be discriminated against negatively or positively. (Graeme, Principal, School C)

As Windle (2017) notes, adopting a discourse of inclusion appears to be a narrative employed by schools with high proportions of refugee students as a way of fostering a stronger reputation within the community. Through positioning themselves as ‘inclusive and innovative’, schools’ distance themselves from concerns of racial or ethnic violence – concerns that are frequently raised when schools experience an influx of students from refugee backgrounds – and reduce the likelihood of white flight (Mays 2018), where student withdrawals may leave schools ‘vulnerable to imposed and ‘quick fix’ solutions’ (Windle 2017). Indeed, this view was prominent in interviews with several school leaders:

It’s not about identifying say individual or different ethnic groups within that, the thing that this school would be most proud of is the fact that it’s truly a multi-cultural school. We are an inclusive school and we don’t deal with divisions between students from different ethnic backgrounds. (James, Principal, School B).

By adopting an homogenised view of the student cohort, schools overlooked Fraser’s (2007) core notion of recognition as a central tenet in the provision of a socially just schooling environment. Equating the needs of refugee students with those from similarly disadvantaged, yet fundamentally different backgrounds, can result in educators failing to recognise when specific support is required, potentially impeding the ability of these students to achieve participatory parity (Kaukko and Wilkinson 2020; Keddie 2012; McIntyre, Neuhaus, and Blennow 2020). Ultimately, while this approach ensured that the schools were able to provide some level of support for refugee students, it also continued to perpetuate superficial understandings of need, and offered few opportunities to increase the recognition of refugee students within their community.

The second school context we consider comprises two schools with small populations of refugee students. In contrast to the other schools, both had ICSEA scores above the national average, placing them in approximately the 50th (School G) and 80th (School F) highest percentiles of socio-educational advantage. Across the student cohort, 25% of all students in School G were in the lowest quartile of socio-educational advantage, and fewer than 10% spoke a language other than English or were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, while in School F, fewer students were from the lowest socioeconomic quartile, however, around 15% spoke a language other than English.

In sharp contrast to the ‘equal’ approach discussed above, the more socio-economically advantaged schools took a more individualistic approach towards understanding the needs of their students. Resource allocation was based on developing a nuanced and individualised understanding of the experiences and needs of each student. As such, the distribution of resources was consistent with research around equitable practice in that it focused on ‘being able to see our students for who they are’ in order to ‘get them to the same point as all of our students when they graduate’ (Annie, Counsellor, School G). As Annie further explained:

It's almost like a case management basis, we don’t call it that and we don’t deliberately structure it like that … But we really try and tailor things, we don’t look at our refugee students as a whole and say, you know “You're all the same and this is what you all need”. (Counsellor, School G)

In practice, this approach acknowledged that structures and processes that supported students from refugee backgrounds differed both in relation to other groups of students, but also among refugee students themselves. Such an approach required significant adjustments across all aspects of the school environment, including policies, school fees, approaches to teaching and learning and wellbeing strategies to support the needs of groups and individuals.

One notable adjustment in the way resources were used concerned school fees, which in the case of School G, were openly waived or subsidised for students from refugee backgrounds. As the principal acknowledged, refugee students attending the school paid ‘little or no fees’, which was made possible through government financial support and the redistribution of income from other families who had the capacity to pay more.

To what extent this practice could be considered fair was vindicated on the basis that equity and social justice formed a key tranche of the school’s philosophy, and that by being flexible about finances, ‘those with less’ were able to attain the same quality of education, while ‘those with more’ were able to put the school’s values into practice. As a result, the school had developed ‘a reputation in the refugee community, that if you want to come … you don’t have to have the twelve grand it costs to do that’ but was also looked upon favourably by other students’ families who ‘feel they’re making a contribution by their fees [in] supporting refugee students’ (Kathy, Principal, School G).

Educators’ dilemmas in enacting equal and equitable approaches

Across both schooling contexts, we see the difficulties schools face in understanding and addressing the needs of refugee students. Schools A-E, dealing with less resources and complex forms of disadvantage, simply lack the capacity to respond to every need, while schools F & G had greater resources, but are required to retain a sense of exclusivity to maintain their reputation and level of funding. In both instances, resources allocated towards particular groups of students were being redistributed – in under-resourced schools to respond to students’ needs more broadly, and in the two well-resourced schools to offer additional support to refugee students – which required staff and school leaders to rationalise how these practices could be considered fair within their particular contexts. Table 2 summarises the contrasting approaches to refugee education by under-resourced schools and well-resourced schools.

Table 2. A summary of approaches to refugee education.

Framing ideas	Under-resourced schools	Well-resourced schools
Equality	Scarce resources used for all students who need additional support. Strong emphasis of equality and equal treatment.
Equity		Additional resources provided to refugee students. Other students perceived to not require additional support. Little concern for equality and equal treatment. Focus on equality of outcomes.
Recognition	Perception that diverse students have multiple disadvantages that are equivalent.	Perception that refugee students are distinct from other students who do not face disadvantages.
Distribution of resources	Use resources to enhance the overall capacity of the school to address disadvantages.	Accumulate additional resources to enhance the outcomes of refugee-background students.

For schools F and G, fairness was more easily justified on the basis that charity and social justice were key to their guiding ethos. Molla and Gale (2019) found that schools who drew on ‘a strong religious ethos to inform their understanding of social justice and community services’ were more likely to implement equity-related policies as they viewed the presence of students from disadvantaged backgrounds as an opportunity rather than a challenge. The reallocation of resources in the present study offered an opportunity for these schools to put their institutional ethos into practice:

We still get significant financial contribution from the government for those students, but we do give them fee remission because we think it’s important. You know, we put our money where our philosophy is, basically. (Kathy, School Leader, School G)

The combination of public funding, school fees and private contributions meant these schools had an abundance of resources. Having more than enough resources to meet the needs of all students meant that educators faced few moral or ethical dilemmas when having to decide where these should be spent.

As a result, educators made seemingly subjective decisions about how to support students, which were based on their understanding of the needs of refugee students. As Keddie (2012) found in conducting case studies of schools with significant populations of refugee students, educators’ perceptions of refugee students can be limited, and risk ‘essentialis[ing] and infantilis[ing]’ their level of need. Indeed, simply having resources in place is not sufficient to support refugee students, but rather educators must have an understanding of where these are needed and possess the capacity to use them effectively (Molla 2021).

Without the luxury of being well resourced, the five disadvantaged schools in this study were faced with more pressing moral and ethical judgements in determining how their resources could best be distributed. Despite all of the schools adopting an equal approach which sought to benefit all students, there were several instances where this approach presented dilemmas for school staff, particularly when it came to addressing difficulties which might require resources being allocated towards a particular group. Interestingly, several participants expressed the view that distributing resources to students on the basis of need was fundamentally unfair. Allocating resources unevenly was considered an ethical issue on the basis that equity, by nature, belied equality. In one school this had given rise to a unique model of distributing funding:

[W]e recognise that … as an inclusive school whilst there is funding predominantly for refugee students, if we don’t give other students access to similar services we’re actually being exclusive as well. So we’re provisioning for our refugee students but also – and working roughly on a 70/30 model for some of the funding, so 70% refugee, 30% other students so that the funding’s still being used for what its intended, but it also means that everyone benefits. (Stephanie, Deputy Principal, School A)

Despite receiving specific funding for students from refugee backgrounds, using this only for designated students while excluding others presented ‘a conflicting moral and ethical purpose’ (Stephanie, Deputy Principal, School A). This school had significant numbers of non-refugee background students with complex needs who didn’t attract specific funding.

Concerns about sharing access to resources equally were voiced in relation to the provision of on-site support services, which although targeted specifically for students from refugee backgrounds, were required for other students:

So our in-house support looks like we have doctor come in regularly, we also have referrals to our psychologist from the doctor that also comes in regularly. We have 2 social workers on site and have a Christian pastoral care worker. And they are specifically for refugee students’, but all of our students can access all of those people. (Jemima, EALD Teacher, School B)

In under-resourced schools, the tension between providing an equal or equitable response, and how it unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged other groups of students was a central concern for staff, and one which had led them to trying to find a fine line which satisfied both their ethical and moral requirements:

The school operates as yes there needs to be some affirmative action done for different groups, but in general it’s very much an inclusive environment where there’s not a separation of people. (James, Principal, School B)

It is this concern which perhaps presents the most significant barrier for the participatory parity of refugee students. Discussing the concept of equity in Australian schools, Sellar and Lingard (2014) note the importance of both fairness and inclusion, yet within schools which have a highly complex range of needs, allocating resources to one group while excluding another can be considered neither fair nor inclusive. Where resources are substantial and sufficient to need, then educators have the luxury of redistributing these, yet few schools which serve disadvantaged communities, and certainly none of those within the present study, found themselves in such a position. Instead, the level of complexity and disadvantage they experienced necessitated that, even when the differences between refugee students and others were recognised and understood, schools used their limited resources in the most ‘equal’ way possible. As Graeme, the Principal at School C surmised: ‘It’s just one of those things where we are all for the preaching about differentiation [but] when it comes to the end, it’s one size fits all’.

Conclusion

Targeted funding is critical in allowing schools to support students from refugee backgrounds. As Miller, Ziaian, and Esterman (2018) maintain, the amount of funding schools receive dictates the way in which they are able to respond to the needs of their students. However, at least within the Australian context, refugee students are largely invisible in Australian funding policy (Keddie 2012), and many schools lack the resources necessary to meet their diverse needs (Pugh, Every, and Hattam 2012). As this research shows, the capacity of schools to support refugee students was, to a large extent, dependent upon their access to funding, but also heavily influenced by contextual factors, notably the multiple and complex forms of disadvantage represented within their student cohorts.

For the majority of refugee families who arrive in Australia, their choice of educational institutions is severely limited. Having been resettled in areas of significant disadvantage where they have access to subsidised government housing or housing rental is more affordable, local government schools are often the only accessible option for their child. Thus, some schools have higher levels and multiple forms of disadvantage. This study shows that such schools struggled to support these students because of the dilemmas about allocating resources to those that need it. In particular, these schools struggled to respond directly to the diverse needs of refugee students (Windle 2017). This study showed that some refugee students attended more advantaged schools with less complexity and received more individualised and holistic responses to their needs.

In exploring how refugee students were supported across these schools, the findings showed educators, particularly those in disadvantaged schooling contexts, faced a difficult dilemma in deciding how to distribute funding; a dilemma which was informed by their moral and ethical obligations to support all children in their care. This aligns with the assertion by Molla and Gale (2019) that the personal dispositions of school leaders guided the extent to which they engaged with equity policies. In the present study, the complimentary needs of refugee students and those from other disadvantaged backgrounds resulted in educators using resources, even those targeted towards refugee students, in a way that supported all students. Adhering to equality for all, individual differences between students were overlooked on the basis that the resources available would be insufficient to support this diversity of needs. In contrast, other schools responded more directly to the needs of the individual, but this approach was only sustainable by limiting the number of refugee student enrolments.

Drawing on Espinoza’s (2007) and Sellar and Lingard’s (2014) assertions that educational equity rests on the notion of fairness, our findings show that educators understandings of what is fair are deeply rooted within the context of the school itself. In well-resourced schools, the redistribution of funding contingent with student needs was considered fair as it corresponded with core values of charity and philanthropy; yet in schools where resources were scarce, such an approach was considered fundamentally unfair as it intentionally excluded or disadvantaged other students. In determining how school resources are used to support students from refugee backgrounds, the findings show that context plays a crucial role, affecting not only the way in which those resources are allocated, but the way in which refugee students are perceived. While Fraser (2007) argues that equity requires the recognition, representation and redistribution of resources, our findings suggest that the capacity of schools to achieve this is impeded both by a lack of resourcing, but also the multiple and complex forms of disadvantage within their student cohorts. An equitable and socially just approach to refugee education therefore requires that schools are given the funding and resources they need to support refugee students, but in a way that doesn’t unfairly disadvantage other students who require similar levels of support.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Linkage Scheme (LP170100145). The following organisations contributed funds and/or in-kind support to this project: Brisbane Catholic Education, Queensland; Department of Education, Queensland; Department for Education, South Australia; Catholic Education, South Australia; Brisbane Australian Refugee Association.

Notes on contributors

Neil Tippett

Neil Tippett is a Lecturer and a member of the Centre for. He is currently as a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects. His research focuses on student behaviour and wellbeing, inclusion and education policy.

Melanie Baak

Melanie Baak is a Senior Lecturer and member of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia. She is currently an ARC DECRA fellow and co-convenor of the Migration and Refugee Research Network (MARRNet). Her research broadly covers areas of equity and inclusion, particularly in schools, with a focus on refugee education and resettlement.

Bruce Johnson

Bruce Johnson is Emeritus Professor is a member of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia. His research interests include human resilience, early career teachers, classroom management and sexuality education.

Anna Sullivan

Anna Sullivan is Director of the Centre for Research in Educational and Social Inclusion and Professorial Lead at the University of South Australia. Her research focuses on the ways in which policy and practice includes and/or excludes those who are most vulnerable in education.

Notes

1 Ethics approval for this project was granted by the administering organisation’s Higher Education Research Committee (ID No: 200841). Approval was also obtained from relevant sector organisations.