Migrants in Schools: What are the effects?
I believe that part of the answer may lie in the fact that people see two things occurring at the same time and (falsely) infer a causal relationship. For example, if we see lots of migrants in areas with ‘low performing’ schools, one way to understand this is that increased migration has put pressure on schools, causing their performance to deteriorate. However, an alternative explanation is that migrants send their children to ‘low performing’ schools because they cannot afford housing in ‘good areas’ with more popular schools. It is not, then, the case that an increase in migration has made those schools ‘low performing’. Indeed, migrant families often have a very strong work ethic (after all, they often move for work-related reasons), and understand the importance of education for their children. In fact, a recent study that tries to explain why schools in London have improved far more rapidly than schools elsewhere in England attributes this to the more multi-ethnic composition of the city (spurred by immigration).
The only way we can try to separate out competing explanations for facts on the ground is through a careful analysis of data where we have information about pupil achievement in tests, the percentage of pupils that are migrants, and other measures of school and personal characteristics that might be relevant. Such studies have been carried out in a number of countries: see for example two papers about primary schools in England and The Netherlands that appeared in the Economic Journal in 2013. Both studies note that migration in these countries has increased substantially in recent years, yet they found that this has not led to any deterioration in test scores for native students in those countries.
The study of schools in England found a slight negative association in the raw data between the educational attainment of native English speakers and the proportion of non-native speakers in their year group. This association is halved once the demographic characteristics of native English speakers have been accounted for, and disappears altogether once the type of school attended by non-native English speakers has been accounted for. This means that the negative association in the raw data reflects the fact that non-native English speakers typically attend schools with more disadvantaged native speakers. Once this fact has been taken into account, there is zero association between the presence of non-native speakers in greater numbers and the educational attainment of their native English-speaking peers.
The same study also used another strategy to look at the relationship between the percentage of white non-native English speakers and the educational attainment of native English speakers. This strategy uses the fact that the number of white non-native English speakers grew dramatically after the EU’s eastern enlargement in 2005. Since many of the new immigrants were Polish (and often Catholic), there was a significant rise in demand for Catholic schooling. The data shows a much higher increase in the percentage of white non-native English speakers in Catholic (state) schools after 2005 compared with other schools. This ‘natural experiment’ provides a way of seeing if there were consequences for the relative educational attainment of native English speakers in Catholic schools. The results in reading and writing show no clear impact, but there is some evidence for a small positive effect in the case of maths. In other words, native English speakers at Catholic schools with a relatively high increase in white non-native speakers benefited from this to a small extent in their maths results. A possible reason for this result may be the fact that immigrants from Eastern European countries are better educated and more connected to the labour market than the native population. The children of such immigrants may be a welcome influence in the schools they attend.
People are right to observe that migrants often live and work in areas with negative characteristics (such as poorly performing schools), but they are wrong to imagine that the situation would improve if there were fewer migrants. The same phenomenon is often true in other contexts (such as the labour market). It is not migration itself that is the problem, so much as negative public and political attitudes.
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Sandra McNally is a Professor in the School of Economics at the University of Surrey, UK. She is Director of the Centre for Vocational Education Research at the London School of Economics.