Worldwide, about 90 million people are currently forcibly displaced, half of them children and adolescents. European societies face the challenge of promoting these young people’s adaptation and integration processes. Supporting refugee and migrant adolescents’ mental well-being is herein pivotal, as their past experiences may disrupt their psychosocial functioning. Yet, also in the host country, recently arrived adolescents face several stressors of acculturation, residence insecurity, social isolation and discrimination, all impacting their mental health. This accumulation of difficult life experiences places refugee and migrant youngsters at increased risk for mental health difficulties and less academic achievements. On the other hand, factors of social support, family cohesion and positive school experiences may promote their well-being.
Recent studies have emphasized the preventive role of schools in promoting young refugees' mental well-being. However, there is still little evidence showing what works in school-settings. The overall objective of RefugeesWellSchool is therefore to further the evidence-base on the role of preventive, school-based interventions in promoting refugee and migrant adolescents’ mental well-being, and on how they can be implemented in educational settings. We herein put a specific emphasis on interventions furthering social support networks and social cohesion.
Although the project has been strongly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and related closure of the schools during the implementation of our interventions, we found that both young refugees and migrants as participating teachers strongly valued the interventions. Although little quantitative evidence was found for the interventions’ impact, possibly explained by the disruption of the interventions due to COVID, some evidence for particular aspects could be found, also in the qualitative data, pointing to the importance of the social support elements of the interventions. Both students and teachers for example indicated that the interventions helped in getting to know each other better, in listening to each other, sharing experiences, building connections and experiencing a sense of belonging. At the same time, sharing personal stories is not easy in a group, and sometimes counteracted coping strategies of active avoidance of painful stories. In this regard, the interventions’ mechanisms of providing safety and socially engaging, creative activities may have played a role to experience the interventions as positive.
In all interventions, larger structural and organizational issues played a role in how the interventions were carried out, and how they could become sustainable. Rigid curricula, teachers’ high workload, lack of adequate resources, and the structurally separated nature of newcomer education in some countries were among some of these barriers. These constraining realities in society are important to be detected and understood in order to optimize intervention environment.
