Untapped Skills Realising the Potential of Immigrant Students

“Integrating immigrant student populations poses significant challenges to the quality and equity of education systems across OECD countries. Migration is not a new phenomenon, but ageing populations and the looming threat of labour and skill shortages have brought the issue to the top of the policy agenda in many countries” (p.3).

“This book looks at the educational attainment of immigrant children and how it could be improved, drawing on results from the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures the performance of students at the age of 15 across the OECD and a number of other countries” (p.11).

Published in 2012, the authors draw on data from “…65 countries and economies, including all 34 OECD countries and 31 partner countries and economies” (p.15).

The book is organized into six chapters:

Chapter 1:  Overview of Immigration Regimes and Education Systems

Chapter 2: The Performance Profiles of Immigrant Students

Chapter 3: Mastery of the Assessment Language and Reading Outcomes

Chapter 4: Immigrant Students’ Age at Arrival and Assessment Results

Chapter 5: Parental Education, Immigration Concentration and PISA Outcomes

Chapter 6: Post-Secondary Attendance of Immigrants in Switzerland and Canada

(Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

The authors document the following challenges faced by immigrant children: • “Immigrant students underperform in PISA, but the performance gap between them and non-immigrant students varies considerably across countries, even after adjusting for socio-economic differences” (p.11). • “Language is an obstacle to school achievement for many immigrant students. The most obvious challenge for many students with immigrant parents is adapting to a new language and a new learning environment…However, PISA results suggest that the older a child is at arrival, the less well he or she does in reading at age 15” (p.11). • “Lower performance is more strongly associated with a higher concentration of socio-economic disadvantage than with a higher concentration of immigrants or foreign-language speakers” (p.12). To address the above challenges, the authors make recommendations that could potentially improve the educational attainment of immigrant children, including: • To reinforce language-learning policies “…for very young immigrant children and for those students who arrive later with little knowledge of the host-country language. Relying too heavily on the “natural” language-learning ability of young children or on the assumption that a basic level of language proficiency is sufficient will not yield satisfactory results. Children may learn quickly, but not to the level required to progress adequately in school” (p.14). • “The adverse effects of the concentration of disadvantage need to be reduced. The policy choices here are difficult. There is the option of investing more heavily in disadvantaged schools, without attempting to change the extent of concentration. The expectation is that education policy measures, whether in the form of better teachers, smaller classes or more remedial help, can indeed improve outcomes, even under unfavourable conditions. But this is a costly option. A different policy choice would involve attempting to reduce the degree of concentration through housing or school-choice policies, options that are likely, however, to be more difficult and controversial to implement” (p.14) (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2012
• Author(s): Lemaitre, Georges; Montt, Guillermo; Borgonovi, Francesca; Zoido, Pablo; Mestres, Josep; et al.
• Organizational Author(s): OECD
• Funding Source: Funding source not identified
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Damon Jones
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies