Speeding up and slowing down: managing migrant children’s schooling and resettlement in an English city

Abstract

ABSTRACT There is an expectation that schools generate certainty in migrant children’s lives in the processes of resettlement in host communities. However, there is also a critical body of literature highlighting a tension between an inflexible system of mass compulsory schooling that predominates in most affluent “destination” countries and the complex multi-dimensional nature of migrant children’s lives. In this paper, we examine the relationship between migrant children settling in an English city and their schooling, drawing on empirical data from two schools and a youth organization. Our empirical themes focus on the management of migrant children’s pace of learning and integration. Drawing on data from two English city schools we highlight factors that both “speed up” and “slow down” processes of resettlement.