THE EDUCATION OF REFUGEE CHILDREN. Human Rights Enactment and Educational Policy Discourses in Italy and the UK

This chapter, based on a pilot study, critically explores the enactment of refugee children’s right to education established by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), adopting a comparative European perspective. It draws on the ontological perspective of policy enactment (Ball, 1990; Ball et al., 2011), and it connects also with the sociology of human rights, as it considers strengths and weaknesses of national and transnational systems of entitlement and protection, as well as the social processes by which groups accrue rights, and the way in which already established rights could be eroded (Douzinas, 2007; Tomasevski, 2006). The focus on the UK and Italy is a response to the increasing need to examine discourses at international and national levels of policy-making and enactment in relation to the right to education of asylum-seeking and refugee children. The comparison of the two countries intends to draw connections between the educational policies of two states that are party to the CRC, both of which bear a duty towards all children (see Hyll-Larsen, 2010), while examining the ambiguity of policy discourse concerning asylum-seeking and refugee children’s access to education. The comparison between the UK and Italy also reveals how policy-making and enactment have an impact on the formation of the racialized imaginary that make up ‘Fortress Europe’; and how the different and yet significant colonial history of the two countries shapes the present policy discourse on matters related to ‘diversity’ in education