Cumulative disadvantage? Educational careers of migrant students in Irish secondary schools

Abstract

Recent rapid immigration of a diverse group of migrant children into an almost exclusively White Irish school population makes Ireland an interesting case study for migrant education. This article explores key points in the careers of migrant secondary school students in Ireland from an equality perspective. The article draws on data gathered as a part of a large-scale study specifically designed to investigate provision for migrant children in Irish schools. The results of the study show that migrant students in Ireland face a number of educational barriers in terms of access to schools, placement in classes, year groups and types of secondary school programme. This disadvantage is likely to impact on their future life-chances in terms of progress to further education and their place in the labour market, as well as their general social positioning in the Irish society.

Seven Principles for Assessing Effectively Maintained Inequality

“…Immigrants are participants in stratification processes in the nation under study, whether in their own generation or intergenerationally. They or their children may be at risk for experiencing the outcome of interest, and their experiences may be directly relevant to the maintenance of inequality (e.g., Darmody, Byrne, & McGinnity, 2014). How should one proceed analytically in such cases?…”

Immigration and the Ambivalence of the School: Between Inclusion and Exclusion of Migrant Youth

“…Recent studies have repeatedly stressed that young immigrants in Portugal have worse school performance than the nationals (e.g., Pires, 2009;Seabra, 2012), a situation that has also been reported in other European countries (e.g., Govaris & Kaldi, 2012;Hackett, 2012) and also outside Europe (e.g., Darmody, Byrne, & McGinnity, 2014;Nicolas, DeSilva, & Rabenstein, 2009;Zufiaurre, 2006). Despite this identification of cultural and ethnic specificity as a main cause for the academic underperformance of young immigrants, several studies have emphasized that the families' social condition has a at Imperial College London Library on June 4, 2016 uex.sagepub.com Downloaded from significant impact on the results of immigrant pupils (e.g., Darmody, Smyth, Byrne, & McGinnity, 2012;Seabra, 2012), namely the socioeconomic status (Nicolas et al, 2009).…”

‘Hella ghetto!’: (dis)locating race and class consciousness in youth discourses of ghetto spaces, subjects and schools

“…These accounts instead reinforce the increasing permanence of the dislocated ghetto where sustained economic recession and state retrenchment often override the traditional avenues young adults employ for upward mobility (Darmody et al 2012). Schools formed part of an imperfect milieu of institutional technologies that Rios terms a ‘youth control complex’ to keep the youth and their communities dislocated from formal structures of power and thus easily (re)movable should the need arise, whether in terms of labor needs or land use (Rios 2011; Giroux 2009).…”