School Integration in a Southern Norwegian Municipality Factors that Hinder the Integration of Unaccompanied Young Refugees into the Norwegian schools

Abstract

Unaccompanied young refugees constitute a vulnerable portion of the refugee population because of the numerous hardships they contend with both in the country of origin and during the flight. Given the plethora of challenges they face, many often find it challenging to integrate into the school environment and society at large. This study attempted to explore and describe the challenges unaccompanied young refugee students faced as they navigated their everyday schooling in a southern Norwegian municipality. By applying a mix of purposive and snowball sampling methods, 15 unaccompanied young refugee school students, three schoolteachers, and one municipality official responsible for the municipal schools were interviewed through a semi-structured qualitative method. The data were analyzed thematically, which resulted in the generation of codes and themes. The findings indicate that the unaccompanied young refugee students struggled with numerous challenges such as separation from family, combining work with the school, language difficulty, and a lack of social network in the school context that significantly hindered their school integration. In order to build social networks and better integrate into the school context, many expected to transition to the mainstream school environment as theywere placed in linguistically isolated classes and have more shared social activities with the Norwegian peers.