Waiting for School: newly arrived young people learning in limbo
By Mary-Rose Puttick, ICRD
All children have a right to education. This right is established internationally in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 28 (1989) and enshrined within UK legislation. Section 19 of the UK’s Education Act 1996 sets out the legal requirements for local authorities to ensure that all children of compulsory school age are provided with education that is appropriate to their age, ability, and any additional needs.
Whilst local authorities in the UK have a 20-day target to find children from refugee and newly arrived backgrounds a school place, in reality this wait tends to be much longer, particularly for young people of secondary school and college age, as well as those with special education needs. There are currently approximately 37,000 people seeking asylum who have been placed in hotels and often local authorities and support services are not informed of their arrival. For young people this invisibility delays their entry into the school system even further.
Lengthy waits for young people living in hotels mean that they are stuck in small rooms for long periods of time with potential mental health implications due to social isolation, exacerbated by trauma from their journey and the conditions from which they and, for some, their accompanying family members have left.
Freeing the Body
Considering these circumstances, how then can we best support young people living in such dire circumstances whilst they await a school/college place? In some hotels, charities provide education support for children and families. However, third sector provision in hotels is inconsistent across localities, with provision often reliant on volunteers and in makeshift spaces. Language learning is one key component to support young people’s eventual transition into formal education, yet this needs to be done in ways that is sensitive to their arrival and attuned to their living circumstances.
In the British schooling system, and many other mainstream schooling systems in the West, the importance of learning through the body is something that is largely overlooked. Traditionally, educational policy has prioritised solely the mind as a form of worthy intelligence.
Yet this absence of the body overlooks many important aspects of learning such as social interactions and sensory ways of knowing.
Through our bodies we can experience both liberation and oppression:
‘Entering school, I learned that coming to know was not inclusive of body knowledge. My physical being, which felt pain, joy, tiredness, exasperation, love, and energy, possibility and freedom, was to be ignored, even controlled’ (Shapiro, 1999: 5).
What then when newly arrived young people’s bodies are controlled by confinement to a solitary hotel room or a single hotel room with several family members? Or when choices of how to fuel the growing body is taken away as well as well as opportunities to build community through cooking and eating together?
The Waiting for School project drew on the expertise of 14 professionals across three societal sectors, schools, local authorities, and the third sector, in the UK metropolitan Council boroughs of Birmingham, Sandwell and Wolverhampton. All were involved in supporting newly arrived children and families in different ways, including teaching, advocacy, and arts therapies, in schools or hotels. One of the participants in the project was the Birmingham Centre for Arts Therapies (BCAT).
The Arts in Health leader for the charity recognised the spatial confinements that living in a hotel for indefinite amounts of time brought to families and the importance of arts and music for disrupting this containment:
“We’re trying to create a welcoming environment for everyone to engage. People in temporary accommodation don’t know what will happen to them, and it’s especially hard if you don’t have English skills. Arts and music are universal, we all respond to them in some way on an emotional level and the need for language becomes secondary. It’s an important way you can express yourself and let it out rather than containing emotion in a hotel room in what can be like a prison environment” (Richard Mole, BCAT)
Two of BCAT’s ‘Creative ESOL’ teachers talked about the importance of group tasks in which everyone has a role and a purpose so that everyone in the group feels valued. Important also was a focus on movement and making, in which language learning emerges organically from the activity so that young people don’t feel overwhelmed. One of the teachers discussed the positive responses and interactions she had seen from young people of all ages with group activities such as pizza making and making edible superheroes. With older children role plays work well as well as visual vocabulary games.
Cross-sector Partnerships
Overall, the project brought to the fore examples of inspiring practice happening across spaces of limbo with young people, even once getting a school space, often having to move schools when they were moved to other accommodation or sometimes other cities. This waiting space is one of juxtapositions of time and transiency with young people experiencing the slowness of waiting in hotel rooms alongside a freedom of movement when opportunities arise for arts-based language provision, as well as the fast pace of the school classroom where most learning takes place sitting static at a desk.
This waiting space is one where cross-sector partnerships between schools, the third sector, and local authorities are key in helping to support the wellbeing of children and families living and operating in complex situations and poor conditions and where professionals in all of these sectors are also working hard to do their best for families under constrained funding and resources.
Funding for arts-based therapeutic provision in hotels is vital to ease young people’s transition to formal education settings and as a release from the boredom of isolation. The Waiting for School participants co-produced a professional development resource for teachers in schools and the third sector with key takeaways for language practice, and some ideas for group and individual professional development activities. The resource can be downloaded for free here:
https://wlv.openrepository.com/handle/2436/625345
Dr Mary-Rose Puttick is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Community Research and Development at the University of Wolverhampton
