Entering the School as a Refugee Minor: A Comparative Analysis of School Admission in Italy and Sweden

Assessment of existing knowledge is essential to address new arrivals to appropriate grades. Modalities and policies adopted in assessing pupils’ prior educational levels also help the authors analyze how education-related migration policies are conceptualized and implemented in institutional settings. Through the “most-different” logic of comparison, in this chapter, the authors investigate refugee education policies of Italy and Sweden, focusing on the first phase of schooling: skill and knowledge assessment and placement to classes. The analysis relies on an in-depth policy text analysis. As expected, these two countries present remarkable differences in newcomers’ skill assessment and school admission policies. While Sweden adopts a centralized assessment test on students’ previous schooling, aiming to address new arrivals into mainstream classes as fast as possible through mother tongue assistance, in the absence of a national framework, school admission is highly fragmented and regionalized in Italy. Despite these differences at the macro-policy level, in both contexts, school leadership and the agency of involved actors have substantial importance in the first phase of refugee pupils’ school placement.