Reception education for children and young people from Ukraine: Lessons learned from the Danish context

Abstract

This paper offers a characterization of the model for reception education that was prescribed in the Danish special legislation on Ukrainian refugees (2022) and explores how the legislation and different reception models were perceived and negotiated by agents on different levels of municipal administration and school practice in two case municipalities from the spring of 2022 to the autumn of 2023. Focusing on the purposes of refugee education, the study addresses how reception education models are negotiated vertically, that is, from the state policy to the municipality and school levels, and horizontally in different temporal phases. The paper contributes to the scholarly debate on the complexity of the reception of Ukrainian refugees, which both is related to the possibilities for an updated education model for newcomers that considers multilingualism and temporariness as parameters of reception and the ongoing debate on differentiation mechanisms between refugee groups and how political discourses and considerations influence pedagogical practice regarding newly arrived children and young people. We conclude that although the special legislation signals the enabling of multilingual reception education and a more nuanced purpose of reception, our case studies indicate that the Ukrainian group has not fully benefited from the possibilities of the law.