Schools and Families in Partnership

Many students from refugee backgrounds are highly likely to be disadvantaged when attending school in Australia. In addition to experiencing the trauma of war, displacement and disruption to education, students and their... [ view full abstract ]

Many students from refugee backgrounds are highly likely to be disadvantaged when attending school in Australia. In addition to experiencing the trauma of war, displacement and disruption to education, students and their parents/carers may be unfamiliar with the Australian school system. Whilst many students may be multilingual, they may have limited English language skills, particularly for academic purposes. Whilst parents/carers will have high aspirations for their children’s education, many parents/carers from refugee backgrounds may have had limited access to schooling themselves, have different cultural expectations of parental engagement in school and be unsure about their capacity to contribute to their children’s education.
This paper will explore the opportunity for schools to recognise the strengths parents bring and the contribution they can make through opportunities for authentic engagement with schools. Schools and Families in Partnership: A desktop guide to engaging families from refugee backgrounds in their children’s learning (VFST 2015) is the culmination of a project which brought together school leaders and parent advisory groups across metropolitan and regional Victoria over a period of 18 months. Primary, secondary, city and rural schools, chosen because of their inherent understanding of the refugee experience and the capacity of school to be a site of recovery during resettlement, were involved in the development of this resource. A background paper. Educating children from refugee backgrounds; a partnership between schools and parents has informed the development of the desktop guide. The resource reminds schools that whilst some parents/carers from refugee backgrounds may not be formally educated, they should be recognised as co-educators of their children. Such recognition supports recovery and aids resettlement.