School staff's perspectives on positive school climate for newly-arrived immigrant students: preliminary results

As many newly-arrived immigrant children have had multiple stressful life experiences, schools often play an important part in offering them stability, a sense of belonging, and social relationships that can promote their integration in the new country. To improve services for newly-arrived immigrant children, schools must focus on improving the environments they create for these children, but understanding of how to do this is limited because empirical evidence on school climate in the context of migration is scant. To bridge this gap, semi-structured in-depth interviews with four members of staff in schools (primary teacher, secondary teacher, nurse, and psychologist) were carried out for this report.

Authors of the study shaped their research around the key question of how staff define a positive school climate for newly-arrived immigrant students. The results demonstrate that when defining a positive school climate for newly-arrived immigrant students, staff mainly emphasise an individual approach and teachers' professional development, rather than the child's acquisition of the host country's language.