The presented article focuses on two main objectives. On the one hand, it presents the complex and multifaceted issues of migrant children’s education from a theoretical perspective, which have a significant impact on the course of their integration process, their quality of life and their chances of a better future in the country of migration. We draw attention to the importance of migrant children from the perspective of a child-centred approach, which emphasises children’s agency and subjectivity, the importance of their voice, their experiences, as well as the mission of the school and the roles of the professionals (teachers, cultural mediators, social workers) working with them and influencing their integration success. We show the school as a space that is not only institutional, formal and oriented towards intercultural education, but also a relational space in which informal processes take place to shape the future of children, dependent on significant others but also on the educational system. On the other hand we refer mainly to the contribution of the research project Children Hybrid Identity (CHILD-UP) to formulate theoretical explanations about the visibility of migrant children, their agency in school, and to uncover empirical findings about their achievements, barriers, challenges. Although these are in various locations, in different schools and educational programmes, they nevertheless bring about changes in the structure of a class and the occurrence of important processes due to their ethnic and national, cultural, religious, and language context.

This paper introduces CHILD-UP (Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a way of Upgrading Policies of Participation), a Horizon 2020 project (Grant Agreement No 822400) which started in January 2019. CHILD-UP deals with the integration of children with migrant background in seven European countries. The project is based on the concepts of migrant children’s agency and hybrid identities in relation to the education system. CHILD-UP project recognises migrant children’s agency as children’s active participation enhanced through the availability of choices of action, which subsequently enhance alternative actions, and therefore change in the interaction. Education can improve the potential of migrant children’s agency in order to change the social conditions of their lives. The concept of agency works in conjunction with non-essentialist theories of culture, denying the existence of permanent membership of cultural groups and conceiving cultural identity as hybrid, i.e. as a contingent product of social negotiation in both public discourse and interaction. In this anti-essentialist perspective, education is the setting for sharing personal cultural trajectories. CHILD-UP analyses the types of intervention that can improve the potential of agency and enhance the hybrid identities of migrant children.

There is a complex relationship between the essentialist and non-essentialist discourses that respectively fail to and succeed in recognising the potential for participation which the children of migrants bring with them into new cultural settings. These competing discourses curl around each other within the structures of educational settings and within all the people involved, including the children themselves. A yin-yang framework helps us to see the nature of this entwined relationship and the hybridity which is the key to untangling it. It helps researchers to understand that getting to the bottom of what is going on is not straightforward and requires that they reassess who they are and how they should proceed. Sometimes it takes unusual and unexpected circumstances, such as those brought about by the emergency of the COVID-19 pandemic to shake their thinking-as-usual and to see the unexpected.

Children are individuals capable of expressing their wishes and needs, making decisions and taking action in order to influence their own living situation and contribute to social life. Furthermore, children’s participation is essential to their development, learning and well-being, and particularly crucial to the integration of migrant children. Accordingly, societal and scientific discourses emphasize the need for the participation of children, including as a substantial element of integration processes. However, research shows a tension between theoretical discussions and concepts, on the one hand, and practices in educational settings on the other. Educational contexts vary in their conceptualizations of children’s agency and participation, as well as the degree to which they provide opportunities for participation or rather set restrictions upon it. 

To illuminate this dependency on respective educational settings in more detail, data from the German sample of the first phase of the CHILD-UP research and innovation project were used to explore two research questions. First, potential differences in perceptions and understanding of children’s participation were investigated by surveying four groups of professionals, namely teachers, educators in early childhood care, after-school educators and social workers. Second, the analyses explored potential associations between intercultural aspects, integration and participation among the four groups of professionals.

Overall, the results showed that children’s participation is emphasized and supported in each of the examined educational settings, but also reveals differences according to school. More specifically, schoolteachers were more reserved about participation than the other groups of professionals. Moreover, although all professionals emphasized migrant children’s integration, a stronger emphasis on assimilation was observed for teachers, which could be explained by structural and normative conditions in the educational setting of school.

The results point to the need for a further examination of these differences by focusing on the interplay between the normative requirements, structural conditions, institutional tasks, as well as professional attitudes of different professions in education. Accordingly, relational approaches to the concept of children’s agency are applied to discuss whether and how relational conceptualizations of participation can overcome an essentialist perspective on children’s participation and may perhaps shed light on the interconnection between participation and integration according to the institutional character of different educational settings.

Based on qualitative interviews with primary school teachers in Greater London, this article explores teachers’ narratives to uncover how children with migrant backgrounds (CMB) are positioned in the contexts of their learning experience. In particular, the article utilises the analytical category of trust to argue that the position of CMB in teachers’ narratives is related to the form of teachers’ trust. When trust is based on categorical inequalities, CMB are often considered untrustworthy partners construction of the learning and teaching experience. Trust based on categorical inequalities becomes a form of trust in distrust and CMB are positioned in the children’s needs paradigm where decision-making is reserved to teachers who act for them and on their behalf. When trust is based on personal relationships, CMB are positioned as agents who are capable to voice their interests, bringing about consequential changes in the contexts of their experiences. CMB are positioned in the children’s interests paradigm, where agency is expected and promoted as a right of children who are socially constructed as agents who can make a difference with their choices.

In this article we present quantitative data collected in Italy for the CHILD-UP project, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme in the period 2019–2022. 

The aim of this work is to focus on a specific topic which emerged during the analysis of the questionnaires collected within schools. This topic is the perceptions of professionals and parents on the issues of integration, cultural differences and the intercultural. 

Starting from a theorization of these concepts, we focus on quantitative data collected in the first part of the project by means of questionnaires distributed in a number of schools in Modena, Reggio Emilia and Genova. These questionnaires were given to professionals, students, and parents in kindergartens, primary schools and lower and higher secondary schools. However, here we only focus on data collected from professionals and parents.

This data shows how participants express ambivalence and disorientation concerning representations of hybridization, celebration of cultural differences, understanding of problems related to intercultural differences and assimilation. Moreover, significant differences exist between professionals (teachers, mediators and social workers) and between professionals and parents, who seem more frequently interested in assimilation.

The transnational transitions of migrant children are complex, mobility-affected processes during which they mediate between various social fields. Their attachment to these fields is often determined by different socialization agents, among which great attention should be paid to peers and friends. Peers not only introduce a new culture and society to migrant children but also affect the young migrants’ motivation, formation of identity, and group socialization. This study adopts the theory of social capital and agency, defined by Putnam, to explore migrant children’s peer socialization strategies. It draws on qualitative research with migrant children in Poland aged 8–13, their parents, and their teachers, and is based on a child-centered approach. The findings present three main ways in which migrant children exercise their own agency to build social capital by maintaining ethnic/non-ethnic ties in the receiving country. The age, gender, and ethnic differences that appear in the application of peer socialization strategies are also revealed.

The aim of this article is to analyse how teachers experience, navigate and negotiate their daily work in Polish school with migrant children. We explore the title statement of one of the teachers we interviewed – we look at the teachers’ strategy of ‘doing everything with their own hands’. The data presented in the article comes from the quantitative and qualitative study conducted within the CHILD-UP project. The research was conducted in two different locations that allowed us to capture the diversity of migrant children in terms of their status and the specificity of working with them: in a large city in the south of Poland characterized by a significant influx of immigrants in recent years, and in the Lublin Province, where schools are attended mostly by refugee children from Centers for Foreigners. The article provides an analysis of teachers’ agency at three different interconnected levels: the macro level (public policies), the meso level (local community), and the micro level (specific schools and their community). We claim that teachers’ agency expressed by them in a constant search for new tools to support migrant children’s education and integration is shaped by complexities of social, economic and political factors produced by the school system in Poland.

The number of students in the Polish education system from migrant backgrounds has regularly increased in the second decade of the 21st century. Many of them arrive with little to no literacy in Polish. The educational system was not prepared to accommodate these new students; Poland was previously considered an emigration country as opposed to an immigration one. Polish classes were linguistically and culturally homogeneous and teachers rarely had Polish language learners in their classrooms. They were not used to teaching multicultural, mixed, and heterogeneous groups of students and most have to find teaching strategies to best respond to new students who were also learning Polish.

Changes in Polish educational laws in 2016 opened up the possibility of preparatory classes (PC) (oddziały przygotowawcze) in schools, although some schools decided to challenge this. In this paper, teachers’ competencies in teaching the newly arrived students in reception classes is discussed. This research was carried out with the goal of understanding teachers’ beliefs, experiences, attitudes, and competencies in this completely new context in their professional experience, namely teaching students from a migrant background in preparatory classes, as well as students who need language or academic support, require intercultural education and a friendly learning environment, or for whom curricula in regular classes were not accessible.

This article presents empirical findings from the H2020 CHILD UP project with an investigation of the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic on migrant children’s education and wellbeing in school. It aims to understand if and how the new education landscape and hybrid learning initiatives have changed inclusive education efforts geared towards migrant students in two Communities of Belgium. ‘Inclusive education’ is a key term often used in pedagogical discourse and describes an ideal situation where the unique, individual educational needs of each child can be met while the child remains in the mainstream classroom. The particular needs of migrant students, however, are often overlooked in inclusive education discourse, and their position can become even more complicated with the added pressures of the pandemic. Through questionnaires and interviews with students, teachers, and other school actors, we found that migrant students were often disproportionately negatively impacted by hybrid and remote learning measures, but that the situation also offered some surprising opportunities for mentoring and peer support and these contrasting outcomes are presented here.

The article focuses on the role of stakeholder involvement in social innovation research, exploring the reasons, strategies and difficulties associated with the dialogue between researchers and stakeholders. More than an original research article, it has the modest ambition of making a contribution to the current debate on the role of stakeholders in social research, based on the approach and results to date of an ongoing research project on the integration of migrant children, CHILD-UP, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Programme in the period 2019–2022. In contrast to major contributions that focus on the relationship between researchers and policymakers, this article refers to many different categories of stakeholders, some of which are only active at the level of grassroots practice. Rather than focusing on the direct relation between researchers and decision makers, CHILD-UP has adopted a broader, predominantly bottom-up approach to how research results can influence current practices and future policies.

After a general introduction referring to mainstream contributions on the subject, the articulated and decentralised approach of the CHILD-UP Project is described and discussed in the central part of the article. The purpose of this part is not to present the project in itself, but to illustrate how the general approach to stakeholder involvement has been translated into structures and activities that are considered an integral part of the research project.

The final sections report results of interviews with project researchers and build on formative evaluation exercises conducted as the project has concluded its first two years of activity. According to these conclusions, the dialogue between researchers and stakeholders, although recognised as necessary and useful, it still has to overcome a number of difficulties of different nature and requires further efforts to produce all its potential benefits.

The article is devoted to an evaluation of school staff teaching and education experiences in an intercultural environment. A part of the MiCREATE project is presented, consisting of forty four interviews and six focus group interviews with thirty-seven teachers and other school staff from educational institutions across Poland, and more consistently in Krakow. A brief overview of the findings is presented, focused on contemporary shortcomings in diversity teaching, opportunities to enhance intercultural perspectives in education and child-centered approach. The findings are then compared with past and other existing studies to identify similarities and differences. This will be helpful in planning further research activities and shaping intercultural policy in Polish education.

The article is a form of pedeutological reflection embedded in the context of a new professional and social situation that requires teachers and other school employees to quickly adapt to changes and add new social, intercultural and advanced digital competences. The author argues that certain workshop shortcomings will not have a significant impact on the education process, if the teacher retains the ability to flexibly reflect on their actions and approach their tasks. The effectiveness of didactic activities in a culturally and linguistically heterogeneous class will not only depend on the teacher’s skills, but also on how reflectively the teacher approaches their work. 

Since 2001, when the Ministry of Education started to collect data on foreigners attending Polish public primary and secondary schools, their number has increased by tenfold, reaching 42 000 in the school year 2019/2020. The article demonstrates how the Polish educational system has responded to immigrant children’s presence. First, it presents instruments targeted at children with migration experience, which Polish authorities have over the years implemented into law regulating schooling. The second part of the article provides an overview of research on the situation of children with migrant experience learning in public schools. The conclusion is not optimistic: Poland did not have and still does not have a strategic vision of national educational policy encompassing such pupils.

The article discusses selected aspects of the activity of the For the Earth Association aiming to integrate refugee children and women into Polish society. The methodology of case study research is used in order to explore the issue and present the data. The study begins by discussing the role and functions of non-governmental organisations and the nature of the integration process, before outlining a brief history of the formation and activity of the association. The final section presents selected projects with the participation of refugee children and certain groups of Polish society which have emphasised the aspect of integration with Polish society. The analysis of the association’s activity substantiates the hypothesis that it fulfils an integrative function through various forms of education, while also characterising the activity as methods of intercultural activation.