The Fragility of Educational Opportunities for Children of a Foreign Background in Iceland

Negotiated Aspirations after Compulsory Education

Abstract

The foreign population in Iceland has changed rapidly over the past few years, moving from a homogenous population to a more diverse society. Hand in hand with the changing demography, the composition of compulsory Icelandic schools has changed in the past decade, but nowadays, roughly one out of four children in Iceland is of foreign background. These changes pose new challenges if schools are to comply with the inclusive school policy to which they are legally bound.

According to official data, children of foreign background seem to fare worse in school than their native counterparts. There is a clear demographic divide between students who choose subject-based upper secondary schools, with first-generation immigrant boys outnumbering any other groups, and an even more pressing issue is that students of foreign background are far more likely to discontinue their upper secondary studies after four years and are less likely to graduate from upper secondary school. The high drop-out rate from Icelandic secondary schools has long been an issue. It is not unique to students of foreign background. In fact, in their White Paper on education reform, the Ministry of Culture and Education stated that one of their main objectives was to ensure that at least 60% of students would graduate on time. This goal was reached in 2019 – for students of Icelandic background. There is still a long way to go for students of foreign background, particularly first-generation immigrants, further emphasising the role of the students’ background when treading the educational path in Iceland. This situation evokes questions about the openness of the school system, and we must ask ourselves: Are we systematically seeing certain groups of children leaving the school system without a baseline level of knowledge and skills?

This study is based on the findings of PhD research and a thesis. It is a mixed methods study based on a survey distributed in 17 schools in Iceland among teenagers of Icelandic and foreign background and 32 interviews with students of foreign background. All data was specifically gathered for this study. The main objective of this survey is to understand the educational aspirations of teenagers in the last three years of compulsory education. This study addresses the question: how do educational aspirations among students of foreign background in Iceland appear? What do they perceive as their educational opportunities regarding where in the country they live, their perceived ability in Icelandic as a subject at school and to communicate in the language, and the positionality of the family?

This study explores how students negotiate their educational aspirations and how they navigate these aspirations despite the barriers they encounter exacerbated by their background. This study shows how students negotiated their future aspirations based on a perceived lack of language skills and where they resided in the country. This study further shows how a group of students, most of whom aimed for further education, explained how they would leave school to work if their family faced financial difficulties. These findings highlight the fragility of educational opportunities, where the aspirations are highly dependent upon the perceived financial security of the family. Moreover, this study highlights the fragility of educational opportunities, where students evaluate their opportunities regarding their perception of the commonality of hardship in Icelandic society. These findings shed light on the perceived positionality of the migrant family in Icelandic society and underline the complexities of the push and pull factors of the educational path.