OECD Reviews of Migrant Education - Closing the Gap for Immigrant Students: Policies, Practice and Performance
In many OECD countries, immigrant students have more restricted access to quality education, leave school earlier and have lower academic achievement than their native peers. That makes improving the education of immigrant students a policy priority.While there has been extensive research on the integration of migrants into labour markets, little work has been done internationally to examine the education outcomes of their children and explore education policy interventions to improve their performance. The OECD Reviews of Migrant Education were designed to help policy makers develop and implement migrant education policy that will make a difference.
This OECD report recommends that language development takes centre stage in education systems aiming to ensure that pupils from migrant backgrounds achieve well at school. Published in 2010 it identifies that immigrant students often face tougher challenges than others in achieving good education outcomes and they have diverse needs. Given that migrant students make up between 10% and 20% of most OECD countries student population, ensuring they achieve well has a high priority. The report concludes that policies at all levels of the education system need to ensure that the same quantity and quality of language and other targeted support is consistently offered to immigrant students.
The executive summary of the report notes that students who speak a language at home other than the language of instruction face different problems from those who do not. In some countries, older immigrant students arriving at a later stage in their education do not have the same experience as younger immigrants. In other countries, second-generation immigrant students, though born in the country, still face particular challenges; and there may be a performance gap between them and native students. Performance gaps between immigrant and native students are largely explained by language barriers and socio-economic differences.
The differences in language spoken at home and socio-economic background account for a large part of the performance gap between native and immigrant students. This indicates that immigrant students would benefit from language-centric policies and policies targeting more broadly less socio-economically advantaged students. However, even after accounting for these two factors, significant performance gaps still remain. This highlights the need for targeted support measures for immigrant students as part of a larger equity scheme. Other factors associated with better educational performance for immigrant students include: participation in early childhood education and care, early home reading activities, more hours for learning language at school, educational resources at home, a more advantaged school average socio-economic composition, and school accountability measures.
The executive summary of the report and the full report can be freely downloaded
ISBN: 9789264075771
