How schools fail refugee students

Schools provide refugee young people with safe spaces for new encounters, interactions, and learning opportunities. They also deliver literacy, the key to educational success, post school options, life choices, social participation and settlement. Currently Australian schools are poorly funded and ill-equipped to provide effective English as a Second Language teaching and support. A new cohort of refugee students mainly from Africa and the Middle East are struggling. This article discusses the importance of educational interventions that keep in mind both the immediacy of 'what is happening now' and broader postcolonial conditions. It identifies the limits of piecemeal interventions dominated by psychological approaches that individualise the problem and overemphasise pre-displacement conditions of trauma. Such approaches disregard the socio-political conditions of post-displacement and issues of racialisation, acculturation and resilience. The article argues for good practice approaches to schooling and settlement that involve whole-school accounting for organisational processes and structures, policy, procedure, pedagogy and curricula