Children who are legally resident overseas nationals have the same rights to compulsory education as UK nationals and their educational experiences are an important aspect of the migrant-integration story in this country. This chapter examines this issue and argues that migrant children's social-inclusion trajectories show an unevenness. For most children, attending school has equipped them with the resources they need for social integration. However, analysis of examination results shows patterns of under-achievement in some ethnic and national groups that will impact on children's future employment and the economic aspects of their integration.

After reviewing the legacies of past policy, the chapter looks at educational provision in Peterborough and south London and at the varied school experiences of children of Nigerian, Polish and Somali ethnicity. Returning to the definition of integration as the capability of migrants to achieve social inclusion and wellbeing, the chapter argues that factors such as secure housing, fair school admissions practices and secure written-English skills are needed to ensure integration.

Educational legacies

While schools have been admitting migrant children for many centuries, their needs were largely not considered by policy makers until after 1945, when growing numbers of urban schools started to receive the children of post-war migrants.

As discussed in Chapter Three, by the late 1960s integration policy had started to shift away from assimilationist aims and towards policies that are now termed ‘multiculturalist’. Advocates of multicultural education had three broad aims: they sought to improve children's English skills, alongside maintenance of their home language and culture. Multicultural education also explicitly recognised cultural diversity and aimed to prepare all children for life in a multi-ethnic society (Klein, 1996). Multi-faith religious education dates from this period and the first multicultural education advisers were appointed by local authorities in the 1960s. There was also an expansion of English-language teaching for children who were newly arrived in the UK.

By 1970 most English-language support was funded by the Home Office through Section 11 of the Local Government Act 1966, which provided grants for local authorities to ‘make special provision in the exercise of their functions in consequence of the presence within their areas of substantial numbers of immigrants from the Commonwealth whose language and customs differ from those of the community’.