Periodic Reporting for period 4 - IMMERSE (Integration Mapping of refugee and Migrant Children in Schools and Other Experiential Environments in Europe)
Período documentado: 2023-01-01 hasta 2023-11-30
One of the most fundamental challenges lying ahead for the EU consists of the successful integration of these recent arrivals, as well as of longer-established migrant populations, and their descendants. As emphasized by the OECD, the ability of societies to maintain social cohesion in the presence of large migration flows depends on their capacity to integrate foreign-born populations (OECD, 2018). Schools, migrant reception centres across Europe and policymakers are in urgent need of policy recommendations in order to support migrant children.
The general objective of IMMERSE is to draw a representative image of national and Europe’s reality on refugee and migrant children’s integration allowing to develop policy papers with specific recommendations for both policymakers and educational institutions to foster diverse and inclusive societies. IMMERSE has relied on a participatory approach that incorporates all relevant stakeholders (children and their families, researchers, NGOs, policymakers, educators or learning institutions) in the co-creation and validation of a Dashboard of indicators for refugee and migrant children’s integration. This has led to the production of data and policy recommendations that best reflects the particular needs and expectations of the relevant stakeholders.
Besides this synthesis, the central IMMERSE contribution has been the development of a dashboard of 30 indicators to measure integration results (14) and key barriers and facilitators (16). IMMERSE has collected the necessary data and made it available through an interactive Dashboard. The project followed a co-creation stepwise methodology that engaged children, families, and other stakeholders’ voices in the key turning points for decision-making of the indicators’ development process. At the ending of the project, more than 30.000 children, families and other stakeholders have contributed to mapping refugee and migrant’s children integration in Europe and to elaborate a set of policy recommendations addressing the main problems faced by migrant and refugee children. The co-creation strategies implemented during the whole project allowed to incorporate these communities’ voices, recognising their power to identify their own needs and resources as well as to indirectly gain confidence in their own ability to solve some of their challenges.
In parallel, researchers have identified and evaluated a comprehensive collection of positive, innovative, and effective 109 good practices and resources for the socio-educational inclusion of migrant and refugee children. In addition to their identification and description, some strategies to promote their replicability were indicated.