Provision of educational support through after school groups and other initiatives.
The Finnish Red Cross provides an educational integration programme that provides enrolment and after school support targeted at migrants. Volunteers are trained on how to support students both academically and socially. Once asylum applications have been accepted, volunteers provide support with translation and administrative procedures to facilitate enrolment. Volunteers then manage after school groups of students, ranging from five to twenty students. In these groups, volunteers provide academic assistance and serve as mentors for their groups. Students also provide peer support to each other in these groups. These after school groups are open to all school children, and not limited only to migrants, which further facilitates integration.
In Sweden, volunteers provide similar after school support to kids in libraries, mainly targeted at migrants. There are over 200 after school groups which meet in libraries to provide answers to questions from the students and homework support. The Bulgarian Red Cross provides necessary support, including interpretation and administrative assistance, to help the parents of migrant children with the process of school enrolment.
There are 40 afterschool National Society volunteer groups that provide support for about 600 students.
Design. [P1] Focuses on supporting vulnerable migrant students to integrate in school. [P3] Through the peer support component, students participate in implementing the intervention.
- Finding, motivating and training enough volunteers to manage the programme.
- Contacting colleges and universities so that students can volunteer as part of their course requirement helped boost the number of volunteers.
- Broadly disseminating information on the availability of volunteer opportunities to municipalities helped attract a larger and more diverse group of volunteers to the programme.
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