The refugee crisis that has been affecting Europe since February 2022 is putting pressure on various systems: the reception, labor market, housing as well as the education systems. The arrival of large numbers of refugees, mostly women and minors, therefore, forces the education system to take immediate responsibility for the pupils within its school buildings.
This produces a number of challenges, the main one being the reception and integration of pupils of Ukrainian origin. But it also poses a more subtle and less explicit challenge. Ukrainian refugees already benefit from temporary protection status, which allows them to skip most asylum procedures and have access to all social rights, albeit for a time. In our experience, something else is also happening. As we saw recently during a project training we are implementing (WAY) in which more than 60 professors and teachers participated, school teachers are concerned about the inequalities being created within their classrooms. As one of them recalled, assuming two pupils arrive who are both refugees but one from El Salvador and another from Ukraine, the latter will have a better chance of being integrated into the education system due in part to the enormous emotional mobilization that accompanied her arrival. Often, in fact, the arrival of a Ukrainian pupil is 'celebrated' thanks to the joint participation of the city mayor, the headmaster and the parish priest. This is not the case for other types of pupils. Teachers are thus not only faced with the challenge of integrating new Ukrainian pupils, which is already a very complex challenge, but also of avoiding discrimination between refugees and displaced persons, an aspect of symmetry between various nationalities that has also recently been highlighted by both MYRIA (https://www.myria.be/fr) and UNIA (https://www.unia.be/fr). This project should be funded for a few reasons:
- Increasing quality in the work, activities and practices of organisations and institutions involved, opening up to new actors, not naturally included within one sector;
- Building capacity of organisations to work transnationally and across sectors;
- Addressing common needs and priorities in the fields of education, training, youth and sport;
- Enabling transformation and change (at individual, organisational or sectoral level), leading to improvements and new approaches, in proportion to the context of each organisation.
The project intends to pursue a number of objectives and concrete results. To begin with, it intends to contribute to increased support to teachers, school leaders, youth workers and migrant association members so they can better deal with refugees (GENERAL OBJECTIVE). As mentioned earlier, the integration of refugees is a high priority both at the European level and at the level of the countries involved in the project (Belgium, Italy, Czech Republic and Greece). Therefore, this project intends to pursue this general objective. With respect to the specific objective it is to having promoted the exchange of practice on how to foster refugees' inclusion in the participating organisations and the local educational community in this case is to identify and share good practices so that the organisations participating in the project have some extra tools to deal with the problem of refugees' integration in their territories. With respect to the expected results, they will be of three types. As for the first one:
- Having developed 1 pedagogical support tool (PST, from now on) that is based on the whole-school approach to foster refugee integration (which will be presented better later);
- Having developed 1 best practices document (BPD, from now on) that has mapped some best practices on the refugee integration with particular attention to the recent Ukrainian one at Eu and local levels.
Regarding the second and third one:
- Having exchanged the PST and the BPD at Eu and local levels with 40 members of the organization participating to the project during an international workshop;
- Having exchanged the PST and the BPD with the target group in each participating country at local level.
