Feature – Refugees in our schools

Schools are the best place to address the damage done to young refugees, says DOROTHY HODDINOTT.

Any non-English speaking overseas-born student faces issues, from the need to learn English and to cope with the demands of schooling in a new language to coping with an unfamiliar curriculum and teaching styles, separation from their own country, culture and family, and the migrant’s sense of dislocation. Refugee students, however, have additional issues, because they are not voluntary immigrants. They have all had to leave their homes because of a well-founded fear of persecution.

All refugee students have experienced violence and trauma. All have interrupted education – the average for our students at Holroyd High School in Sydney’s west is around four years of lost schooling. In some cases, they have been unable to attend school at all, and are illiterate. Some have been tortured or raped. Some have been enslaved or forced to become child soldiers. Almost all have lost family members and many have seen extreme violence enacted against close family members. Some have endured the perils of flight, only to find themselves locked up in the brutal and alienating environment of Australia’s immigration detention centres.

These experiences are not part of a normal childhood, and are certainly not part of the normal experience of immigrants. The education of refugee children needs to come with a lot of welfare support, and the provision for appropriate counselling. We have built a close relationship with STARTTS, the Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors, to complement and augment the counsellor support available at the school.

There needs to be active liaison with outside organisations, as well, to help the families of refugee students reconcile the past and settle into the community, because if a child has experienced trauma, so has every other member of their family.

There are issues to do with behaviour at school, but fewer than might be thought, because schools are very important stabilising places in the lives of these children. The greatest difficulties we have experienced are with children whose mental health has been damaged by their experiences. Their potential volatility needs to be considered and management plans made to contain them when things go wrong. Extreme behaviour is rare, because most children are very keen to get on with their lives, and put the damaging past behind. Schools perform an essential function in rebuilding trust and hope for the future with this group of students.

Many of the issues refugee students face are similar, but not the same for all. Some have had less interruption to their education, some have had more. Some have had less direct experience of violence than others, and so on. Some have more resilient personalities than others. Every child is different and schools need to think beyond stereotyping refugee students to catering for the individual.

Schools are, in my view, the best place to address the damage done to young refugees, and to reorient these students towards the future. They do this initially by normalising the students’ lives. School is part of the normal expectation of most children everywhere, although not all children have access to schooling. When children are enrolled in school, wearing uniforms, and in class, learning, with exercise books and pens and pencils, the message is one of a normal life, and this is particularly strong for children whose lives have been substantially disrupted.

I start by making sure that the refugee children in my school have school uniform and shoes, preferably new, and books and writing implements. The symbolism in this is very powerful: I am in school, I am dressed like the other kids, I am in class, and I am doing the things normal kids do. The message goes to the parents, as well, and helps reassure them, because they are often fearful for their children – their children may be all they have left.

Sometimes our refugee children have to learn to be children again, because they have been deprived of a normal childhood. I know things are getting normal for refugee children when they start to be naughty like other children, because that shows that they have lost some of their fear and apprehension, but it also means that we need to pre-empt problems through our welfare and pastoral care programs, thinking ahead, so that refugee children aren’t inadvertently swept up by a rigid application of disciplinary processes. They may not know where the boundaries lie, after all, and have to learn where those boundaries are for themselves.

We have to be careful, too, that we don’t fall for an unhelpful deficit model in dealing with refugee children, because ‘fixing’ whatever the deficit is only assumes plugging the gaps, it doesn’t move young people beyond wherever the fix ends up. We have to have higher expectations of our work with refugee students and of them, and longer-term goals than a deficit fix implies.

I don’t dispute the high-need aspect of dealing with young refugees, because they do have high support needs, and those needs may continue for some time after they start with us. The truth is, however, that if we fail to address their particular needs they are at risk because of their vulnerability.

Dorothy Hoddinott is the principal of Holroyd High School, Sydney