Adapting to Diversity: Irish Schools and Newcomer Students. ESRI RESEARCH SERIES NUMBER 8 JUNE 2009

The period since the 1990s has seen immigration into Ireland of a scale and speed unprecedented in comparative context. Immigrants in Ireland are a heterogeneous group in terms of nationality, ethnicity, legal status and language skills, although the largest segment comes from the new EU Member States. Overall, immigration has benefitted Ireland economically as well as providing welcome cultural diversity. However, immigration has posed challenges for schools with little prior experience of dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity. On the other hand, however, the relatively high educational profile of immigrant adults in Ireland provides vital resources to support their children’s education. This study documents the experiences of schools in catering for immigrant children and young people. In doing so, it draws on the first national survey of primary and second-level principals on diversity, supplementing survey data on 1,200 schools with twelve detailed case-studies of schools with differing numbers of immigrant students and varied provision. Combining large-scale survey data with rich information at the school level allows us to provide a more holistic view of school experiences, thus providing a crucial evidence base for future policy development. In this study, we focus on ‘newcomer students’, that is, children and young people both of whose parents originally come from outside Ireland