SSAHE November Webinar | “Education and the Hostile Environment”

Monday 25th November 2024, 17:30-19:00

To register: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ssahe-november-webinar-education-and-the-hostile-environment-tickets-1072187334179

Standing up for school children in the Hostile Environment: what can we do?

Jen Persson, Defend Digital Me

Refugee Students navigating the hostile environment in higher education in the UK “

Louise Ryan, María López and Alessia Dalceggio

The hostile environment in secondary education for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, the challenges for schools and teachers, what teachers are doing to fight back, and what they need to succeed.

Deborah Gwynn, National Education Union (NEU)

Background

In 2015, Nigel Farage suggested that migrants should be banned from state schools for five years, so that they were “pay[ing] into the pot before they take out of it.” While, at present, there has been no attempt by any mainstream party to turn this suggestion into policy, the idea that migration is responsible for shortages of school places in some localities persists.

This is not the only way in which the rhetoric and policies of the hostile environment have become tied up with education. The needs of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers are not being met in schools, colleges and universities. In addition, they are frequently blamed for the country’s economic and social problems and are increasingly targets for racist abuse and violence. The anti-migrant riots this summer were only the most visible expression of a wider and intensifying hostility which has been fanned by politicians, media, and government policies.

Until very recently, children from families with No Recourse to Public Funds were denied free school meals, regardless of income. There have also been attempts to use the increasing surveillance of pupils – something which is in and of itself a cause for concern – to monitor their families’ immigration status; in September 2016, the Department of Education began to collect data on student’s country of birth and nationality until a successful campaign by Against Borders for Children forced them to stop. The latter two examples also point to the possibility of successful resistance to the encroaching hostile environment in schools. In the absence of direction and support from the Department of Education, in some schools teachers have taken the initiative in building resistance to the hostile environment for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, by developing teaching programmes to promote tolerance for diversity and challenge anti-migrant narratives.

Presentations

Standing up for school children in the Hostile Environment: what can we do?

Jen Persson, Defend Digital Me

Together through collective action, the #BoycottSchoolCensus of nationality data and country of birth in the school census 2016-2018 stopped its collection. In 2020 we succeeded in getting those data destroyed. But the Department for Education still hands over pupil data to the Home Office monthly. What action can you take to tell the government immigration enforcement has no place in schools?

Jen Persson is founder of the NGO Defend Digital Me (http://defenddigitalme.org) campaigning for safe, fair and transparent use of data across England’s education sector. As a former Subject Matter Expert for the Council of Europe Committee on Convention 108+, Jen also supported the drafting of Children’s Data Protection Guidelines in an Educational Setting, adopted in November 2020.

Refugee Students navigating the hostile environment in higher education in the UK

Louise Ryan, María López and Alessia Dalceggio

After Brexit and the pandemic, immigration figures to the UK actually increased quite considerably with specific growth in migrants from India and Nigeria on skilled worker and student visas – reflecting the key role that migrants play across the British economy including educational settings.

Contrary to political, media and public discourses, asylum seekers only constitute a small proportion of all annual migrants arriving on UK shores. The hostile environment towards migration, especially towards asylum seekers, has intensified in recent years and looks to continue under the new Labour government. Refugees and asylum seekers are an easy scapegoat to blame for all social ills. Hence, there is a widening disparity between the reality and the narratives (misrepresentations) around migration.

In this paper we begin by drawing on our research with Afghans to analyse how the hostile environment impacts of those whom the UK government claims to support (Ryan, Lopez and Dalceggio, 2024). In particular, we consider how Afghan university students had to change their status following the changing political events in Afghanistan. We then focus more specifically on the ways in which the hostile environment impacts upon refugees’ student experience, as well as on universities’ ability to implement schemes to support access and participation for refugee students – the focus of Alessia’s PhD research.

Louise Ryan is Senior Professor of Sociology and Director of the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University. She has published widely on migration and in 2015 she was awarded a Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences for her contribution to migration research. Louise has received numerous grants for her work on migration including five ESRC grants and three European research grants. Recent project: MIMY – Horizon2020 https://www.mimy-project.eu/. Her two most recent books are: Revisiting Migrant Networks, with Elif Keskiner and Michael Eve (Springer, 2022) and her monograph Social Networks and Migration (Policy Press, 2023).

María López is a Professor of Sociology and Deputy Director of the Global Diversities and Inequalities Research Centre at London Metropolitan University and a Research Fellow at the US-Mexico Centre at the University of San Diego-California (US). María has published extensively on the political violence affecting the lives of women and sexual minorities in Latin America and the Caribbean. Recent publications have appeared in Frontiers in Sociology and in the book Gender Violence in Twenty-First-Century Latin American Women’s Writing (Tamesis, Boydell & Brewer, 2022).

Alessia Dalceggio is a PhD student at the School of Social Sciences and Professions and an awardee of the Vice-Chancellor PhD Scholarship at London Metropolitan University. Alessia’s research focuses on the experiences of forced migrant students in higher education and how they navigate the hostile environment. Alessia’s previous experience is rooted in practice and advocacy. Since 2022, Alessia has been involved in research working with newly arrived and long-established Afghan migrants and refugees, with findings published in the report Afghan Migrants in London: Accessing Support in Hostile Times (2022) and an article in Discover Society (2023).

The presenters’ recent article in Critical Social Policy, 44(2) is entitled “Encountering the hostile environment: Recently arrived Afghan migrants in London” and can be found at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02610183231194876.

Resisting the Hostile Environment in schools

Deborah Gwynn, National Education Union (NEU)

In this presentation, Deborah will draw on the experience of teachers’ unions to explore the hostile environment in secondary education for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, the challenges it poses for for schools and teachers, what teachers are doing to fight back, and what they need to succeed.

Deborah Gwynn has been a teacher in Merseyside for the past 26 years, an NUT/NEU activist for the past 20 years, and is currently the representative on the NEU National Executive Committee for Merseyside and the North West. She is an active campaigner against racism, Islamophobia, and the hostile environment for migrants and refugees and an organiser for Care for Calais. In response to this summer’s anti-migrant riots in the region, she organised a full day of off-timetable teaching about cultural diversity in her school.

Chaired and organised by:

Molly Andrews, Peter Burgess, Gwyneth Lonergan