Home schooling in Covid-19: challenges for migrant families

Editor’s note: The language challenges of the COVID-19 crisis have held much of our attention this year. Here on Language on the Move, we have been running a series devoted to language aspects of the COVID-19 crisis since February, and readers will also have seen the special issue of Multilingua devoted to “Linguistic Diversity in a Time of Crisis”.

Additionally, multilingual crisis communication has been the focus of the research projects conducted by Master of Applied Linguistics students at Macquarie University as part of their “Literacies” unit. We close the year by sharing some of their findings.

In this final post in the series, Claire Livesey shows that children from migrant and refugee families with limited English and limited computer access have been particularly negatively affected by remote learning. She argues that preparing for the needs of vulnerable families during emergencies needs to be incorporated into disaster preparedness.

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Home-schooling during lockdown is really hard

In mid-March this year, Australian schools began to close in response to the escalating Covid-19 pandemic. By early April, most schools had shifted to online learning, and families were faced with the new challenge of having to teach their kids at home.

For this research project, I recently asked a number of parents what it was like to home-school children during a global pandemic. Along with a few curses and tears, the majority offered the same response: “it’s hard. Really, really hard.”

It’s hard for students, separated from their peers and the comforts of routine. It’s hard for teachers, new to the joys of Zoom and having to adapt an enormous amount of material on the fly. It’s perhaps especially hard for parents and carers who suddenly find themselves thrust into the role of full-time educators.

How much harder, then, must this experience be for those whose first language is not English, now expected to help children with schoolwork delivered entirely through an unfamiliar medium? This has been the situation faced by many migrant families during the Covid-19 crisis (and the focus of a research project by the Language on the Move team for which findings are expected early in the New Year).

Home schooling information and linguistic barriers

For first-generation migrants and refugees, the challenges of home schooling are often compounded by language barriers. According to the 2016 census, the majority of Australian migrants speak a language other than English at home, and 17% of those who speak a language other than English are not proficient in English. This number is even higher for migrants entering Australia under refugee status, with nearly a third found to have low levels of spoken English.

For these families, communicating with schools about distance learning and Covid-19 can be highly problematic. When Australian schools closed in response to the virus, teachers and principals were having to relay changing government guidelines to parents on a daily basis. Official statements from the Department(s) of Education at this time contained complex, technical explanations of Covid safety protocols and changes to schooling procedures. Tasked with passing on this barrage of information, many schools sent out e-mails which were equally long, dense and often indecipherable (see also Tazin Abdullah’s research for the same problem with information overload faced by ELICOS students).

Understanding this type of communication requires a level of English literacy which is unrealistically high for many parents, and particularly so for those from non-English language backgrounds. As a result, many migrant parents have been unable to access ongoing communication from schools and government in regard to safety measures around Covid-19. This is a worrying finding during a crisis where, as Ingrid Piller has pointed out, every individual needs to have access to timely health information to ensure the safety of the community as a whole. A prediction borne out by the recent finding of the Victorian government that people born outside Australia were over-represented among Covid-19 infections by 20%.

Teaching in an unfamiliar language

Home schooling lessons present yet another linguistic hurdle for migrant families. Officially, parents in Australia were not expected to “teach” their children during lockdown home schooling, but rather to “guide, aid and facilitate” their learning. In reality, however, many of the materials being sent home by schools look very much like lesson plans, and require much more than casual supervision to implement.

Home schooling lessons have proven to be confusing and at times overwhelming for many migrant parents. Even with high levels of English proficiency, helping children with subjects such as maths can be a challenge due to the highly specific vocabulary required. For the 17% of Australian migrants who aren’t proficient in English, explaining complex concepts in an unfamiliar language poses an even greater challenge. Parents report feeling helpless at the prospect of having to decipher material at a primary or high school level, while they themselves are in the process of learning English.

A lack of access to previously available translation services has compounded this problem. Despite considerable efforts by many schools to provide interpreters and translated materials, lockdown restrictions have made it difficult to give families the support they need. Refugee agencies also report that they are stretched to capacity due to current demand for interpreters. Many parents from refugee backgrounds have limited literacy skills in their own languages, and access to support services is particularly important to meet the demands of home learning.

Additional home schooling challenges for migrant families

A rapid research study by the University of Tasmania found that Australian children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) backgrounds are at risk of long-term disadvantage from home schooling. The report shows significant disparity in levels of access to basic schooling equipment and services, with many vulnerable families lacking the physical space and resources to support home learning.

Of particular concern is the finding that many vulnerable Australian families still lack basic access to computers and reliable internet service. This includes a large proportion of recently arrived migrant and refugee families, whose access to technology is below the national average. A number of recent media reports highlight this issue, interviewing Australian migrants with no home computers, needing to share mobile phones in order to access online schoolwork.

This has serious implications for migrant families in the current pandemic. Students and parents rely on internet access to engage with schools and services. There has been some government recognition of this ongoing problem, with a ministerial briefing paper acknowledging that: “for many Australian families online home learning is not a practical option without additional resourcing”. Additional equipment such as computers and modems have reportedly been made available by the NSW Department of education, and in April the Victorian government announced a program to subsidise NBN connections for students in need.

Better disaster preparation needed

Digital inequality is an ongoing problem in Australia, and the current pandemic has merely highlighted the fact that many vulnerable groups are being left out of this mode of communication.

For migrant and refugee families, increased access to computers only solves half the problem. Digital literacy training is also necessary for parents to be able to navigate online learning programs, with the majority of home schooling material only accessible through platforms such as Google classroom. Targeted services such as interpreters and teaching assistants need to be made available to parents on a consistent basis, with strategies in place for future lockdowns and periods of home schooling.

Individual schools and community groups have gone to enormous lengths to assist migrant families throughout the pandemic, placing considerable strain on already limited resources and personnel. Responsibility for providing these services needs to be at a government level, however, and specifically targeted at vulnerable communities.

As a matter of national disaster preparedness – given the ongoing nature of the pandemic but also considering other future crises – there is an urgent need to ensure that families of all backgrounds are able to communicate with schools, and to prepare for future home schooling events.

Now is the time to take stock of the lessons learnt from the pandemic and incorporate the needs of migrant families into everyday schooling practices.