The importance of learning from data on education, migration and displacement

by Manos Antoninis, Director, Global Education Monitoring Report
Francesca Borgonovi, Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Migration and displacement are complex phenomena which play an important role in – but can also pose challenges to – development. These phenomena also pose particularly important challenges for education and training systems. Firstly, they can rapidly increase the number of people that require education services, thus challenging both richer countries, which until now had been adjusting to shrinking student populations, and poorer countries, where provision is already stretched, especially in remote areas or slums where migrants and refugees often converge.

Secondly, migration and displacement make classrooms more diverse. This means that the range of strategies teachers need to deploy increases in order to cater for a student population with larger differences in background characteristics, such as the language they speak at home.

Thirdly, education is an important means through which migration and displacement can be managed since school often acts as societies’ main instrument for transmitting the social and cultural codes that forge a community spirit.

Information of good quality is crucial to develop the right policy responses, which is why the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 17.18 calls on countries to “increase significantly the availability of high-quality, timely and reliable data disaggregated by … migratory status … and other characteristics relevant in national contexts” by 2020. Yet, collecting statistics on migrants and displaced people to ensure that education and training systems have the capacity to meet their needs is complicated. Population movements take very different forms: international vs. internal; temporary vs. permanent; those moving in successive stages vs. those returning; documented vs. undocumented; voluntary vs. forced, including internally displaced and refugee populations; students vs. workers, and, in the latter case, skilled or unskilled, and so on. Migrants and displaced people themselves may be in different stages in their life cycle or may differ in their circumstances, for example adults vs. children or individuals vs. families.

To address these issues, as part of the Strength Through Diversity project, a two-day forum on data about education, migration and displacement is being held in Paris, organised by the OECD and the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, whose next edition is focusing on migration and displacement. Such issues refer to at least two levels.

At the macro level, demographic data often do not capture the education profiles of migrants and refugees. The ideal data source, which provides information on both stocks and flows of migration by gender, age, and education, does not yet exist. These questions were addressed last month at the International Forum on Migration Statistics, which also looked at one other dimension of  the education-migration nexus: international student mobility.

At the micro level, which is the focus of this two-day event, a range of data sources are important:

• Multi-purpose household surveys that contain information on internal and, in high income countries, international migration via questions concerning the place of previous residence or duration of current residence, such as the World Bank Living Standard Measurement Survey and the European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions. Longitudinal surveys provide further insights.
• School surveys of learning achievement which can link detailed student background to educational outcomes. For example, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) asks questions on the student’s country of birth, age of arrival in the host country, and language spoken at home. PISA also assess aspects of student well-being, such as integration and sense of belonging in the school community.
• Surveys on values and attitudes that can relate education to perceptions of the host population concerning migrants and refugees. For example, three waves of the International Social Survey Programme, six waves of the World Values Survey and two waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study tackled relevant questions on this topic. These studies can assess how education systems build values, attitudes, norms and beliefs that improve interpersonal trust and increase civic engagement, which are pillars of democracy.
• Teacher surveys, such as the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), and national surveys that ask questions on teacher preparation for diversity and attitudes towards a diverse student population.

Given the challenges of education systems, the complex forms of population movements, the differences in background characteristics of migrants and displaced people, the different outcomes of education, and the different sources of information available, there is a patchwork of issues, and this requires coordination between researchers and practitioners working in multiple different fields.

The idea of collecting data on education by migratory status that is comparable across countries may be an unattainable goal due to the extreme diversity of migrants and displaced populations. However, the need for documenting and understanding differences in participation, attainment, learning and attitudes between migrants/refugees and host populations for policy purposes remains urgent.

In this context, this two-day forum in Paris has the following aims:

• Provide an inventory of existing data sources and ones that are under development
• Showcase good practices in data and measurement that approach effectively particular aspects of the migration-education relationship and improve understanding of social phenomena
• Identify data and measurement aspects of the migration-education relationship that require urgent attention in order for social phenomena to be better understood
• Assess the merits of equity-oriented migration and education indicators, looking at both intra- and inter-generational issues
• Make recommendations on potential questionnaire items for key areas of interventions the migration-education relationship

Links

Strength through Diversity: The Integration of Immigrants and Refugees in School and Training Systems

Strength through Diversity - 3rd Policy Forum, 12-13 February 2018

International Forum on Migration Statistics

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

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Joining the battle against extremism

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Whoever has a hammer sees every problem as a nail. Those in the security business tend to see the answer to radicalism and terrorism in military might, and those in the financial business in cutting flows of money. So it is only natural for educators to view the struggle against radicalism and terrorism as a battle for hearts and minds. It was no surprise, then, that the roughly 90 education ministers who gathered at this year’s Education World Forum in London, repeatedly touched on this issue.

But the recent terrorist attacks in Europe have brought home that it is far too simplistic to depict extremists and terrorists as victims of poverty or poor qualifications. More research on the background and biographies of extremists and terrorists is badly needed, but it is clear that these people often do not come from the most impoverished parts of societies. Radicals are also found among young people from middle-class families who have ticked all the boxes when it comes to formal education. And ironically, those terrorists seem to be well equipped with the entrepreneurial, creative, global and collaborative social skills that we often promote as the goal of modern education.

But that’s no reason to give up on education as the most powerful tool for building a fairer and more humane and inclusive world. We know that individual trajectories towards extremism flourish in environments that lack social inclusion, well-being and social cohesion. Young people become receptive to extremist ideas when their self-image, self-confidence and interpersonal trust are threatened by fragmented identities and conflicting world views. There is also a clear linkage between countries’ relative success in integrating and educating migrant children and the prevalence of extremism.

Our recent publication, Immigrant Students at School suggests that, certainly in that area, public policy can make a major difference. It highlights how some countries do so much better than others not just in equipping disadvantaged and migrant children with strong academic skills, but also at fostering social integration among these groups. Nine out of ten Norwegian 15-year-old students with an immigrant background say they feel they belong at school, while fewer than 4 out of 10 French migrant students say so. The well-being of immigrant students is affected not just by cultural differences between the country of origin and the host country, but also by how schools and communities help immigrant students deal with the daily problems of living, learning and communicating.

But is that enough to fight radicalism and terrorism? Again, having good academic and social skills doesn’t seem to prevent people from using those skills to destroy, rather than advance, their societies. It comes down to the heart of education: teaching the values that can give students a reliable compass and the tools to navigate with confidence through an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world.

Of course, that is difficult territory. To make one’s way through it, one has to strike a balance between strengthening common values in societies, such as respect and tolerance, that cannot be compromised, and appreciating the diversity of our societies and the plurality of values that diversity engenders. Leaning too far in either direction is risky: enforcing an artificial uniformity of values is detrimental to people’s capacity to acknowledge different perspectives; and overemphasising diversity can lead to cultural relativism that questions the legitimacy of any core values.

Several ministers and commentators I spoke with at the World Education Forum commended PISA for its efforts to build metrics to measure “global competency”, a set of skills that enables people to see the world through different eyes and appreciate different ideas, perspectives and values. Indeed, one of the most powerful responses to extremism and radicalisation seems the ability to read and understand diversity, while recognising that the core liberal values of our societies, such as tolerance, are the foundations on which this capacity rests.

But there is more to this. Since the end of the Second World War, liberal democracies have engaged confidently in the global battlefield of ideas. But in the 21st century, it seems that ideological hegemony will result from genuine and open dialogue for the common good. Liberal and democratic ideas and values will have to prove their worth against competing world views. This is where education comes in as well. Universities and international schools – and the online learning programmes many of them now offer – are perfect venues in which these ideas and values can be shared and debated. It is therefore important to support and strengthen international education in its role as a global exchange of ideas. The five million international students who cross borders, and often oceans, to get the best possible education, are also champions of intercultural dialogue and global understanding. There could even be many more of them if we invest in education sufficiently to be able to offer attractive opportunities for bright people in countries where the ideological battles for young people’s minds are increasingly fierce and the stakes alarmingly high.

Links:
Immigrant Students at School: Easing the Journey towards Integration
Education World Forum
Photo Credit: Fake Dictionary, Dictionary definition of the word radicalism.@ Shutterstock

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