The research is designed to find out more about the recently arrived Polish population in Scotland, and in particular to explore their experiences and expectations concerning schooling.

Scotland’s recent population decline contributes to the Scottish Executive’s encouragement of Polish migrants to work in Scotland, but there is little policy development in schools/education in response to a new situation in which educational opportunities may be taken up. There is a need, therefore, to create new knowledge about the interaction between educational institutions and this new population.

The situation with Polish migrants in Scotland may well be new - not only in that they are entering a space with very few minority population members, but also in that they may not be looking to 'settle' but to create an existence in which they are partly settled (through work and schooling) but remain culturally attached to the 'homeland', whose ways of doing things they keep alive in Scotland, and with which they are closely networked, through family connections, visits and communication. This 'in-between' identity creates new challenges to policy-makers in Scotland, and perhaps, especially to schooling, which is, in any case, not well equipped to respond to the specific needs of children of Polish origin.

The research is exploring the kinds of family and social networks that it has and the ways in which those networks support new migrants in the processes of working out a relationship between 'home' and the new setting of Scotland. It is also exploring the importance of language in maintaining and sustaining feelings of belonging to a 'home' community while located in a new space.

The project has 3 main objectives (a) to find out about the relationships between schools and Polish families; (b) to see how Scottish schools and local authorities are responding to this large number of migrants; (c) to help policy-makers to understand this community and perhaps enable more effective communication between it and educational institutions.

The study takes place over 24 months and has three main stages:

In the first stage, we aim to become familiar with policy context of immigrant integration. At the national level, we analyze the relevant programs and policies on education, language and the integration of immigrants. At the European level we will examine discussions about the relationship between the EU framework and national policies for the integration of immigrants. At the local level we investigate relevant policy documents on social and education policy concerning immigrants produced by the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish Executive, the local authorities and the teacher associations.

The second stage involves detailed case studies of migrant children between 5-17 years old and their families. We investigate this through extended interviews with 65 members of the Polish community (children and parents), asking them about their lives and their experiences in Scotland and Poland. These include levels of education of family members, networks of neighbourhood contacts, sense of security and trust in neighbourhood, networks of interactions with ‘authority’ and experiences of interaction with formal educational institutions. Furthermore the interviews will have a strong focus on the vitality of the immigrant minority language within the family context and will explore the attitudes and experience of immigrant children to their mother tongue language use within and beyond the family.

The study builds also on experience of investigating teachers and education policy-makers. We interview 16 education officers, head teachers, learning support teachers and any relevant inter-professional workers about their attitudes and experiences.

The third stage of the project involves synthesis of all data sources and the identification and discussion of key findings in relation to our overarching research, with the intention of (a) assessing the extent to which there is congruence and coherence in relation to education policy for new migrants at the different levels of governance (b) identifying the role of schooling in the interaction between new migrants and the host society, with particular attention to the place of language and (c) drawing out the implications of our research for policy and practice.

It is our intention that the research will inform public debate in the area of migrant workers children and families’ integration and schooling. The exploration of migrant experiences and expectations, along with investigation of teacher attitudes and policy developments, will help us understand if there really is a new kind of migrant identity emerging in this community, and if educational institutions are responsive to that or continuing to assume that the dominant (Scottish) culture can be produced and reproduced in schooling for these populations. The research will help policy-makers to understand this community and perhaps enable more effective communication between it and educational institutions. We hope that lessons from this research have applicability beyond the specific case of Poles in Scotland. We hope the study will be of particular interest to policymakers, local authorities working with migrant families, organisations working with migrant children, academics, service providers communities and media representatives.