Education and employment training supports for newcomers to Canada’s middle-sized urban/rural regions: Implications for social work practice

Abstract

The last decade has witnessed the movement of immigrants from Canada’s largest urban centers—Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal—to smaller urban-rural communities. Nevertheless, very little scholarship exists on newcomer integration in these communities. Furthermore, social work literature examining the perspective of service providers who work with newcomers is lacking. Grand Erie is a middle-sized urban/rural region in Ontario, Canada that is experiencing increased migration of newcomers. This paper focuses on a part of a larger Community-based participatory research on ‘Newcomer Settlement and Integration in Education, Training, Employment, Health and Social Support’ in Grand Erie and discusses the findings in the education and training domain. Data were gathered from 212 newcomers (men and women) and 237 service providers using survey questionnaires.

Findings

Most of the newcomers in this study had not taken any education or employment courses post-migration. The qualitative and quantitative responses from participants (newcomers and service providers) highlight a lack of affordable child care and poor transportation infrastructure in this region as significant barriers to newcomers’ ability to take education or employment courses especially in case of visible minority women.

Applications

The results of the study suggest that there is an opportunity for social workers to build partnerships with community agencies as well as with policy-makers at regional and provincial levels to foster the social, economic, and political integration of new immigrants in the host society.