Immigrant training and education should focus more on building stronger basic skills
Finnish Education Evaluation Centre FINEEC has published an evaluation report on the impacts of reforms aiming to accelerate the educational pathways of immigrants. The report provides an over-view of these impacts on literacy training in liberal adult education, adult basic education, and vocational education and training. According to the report, it would be important to focus on building stronger basic skills in training and education provided to students with an immigrant background.
The report makes recommendations and identifies development needs for improving the process. To accelerate and simplify the educational pathways of immigrants, FINEEC recommends that more attention should be paid to clearly defining the roles and responsibilities in various forms of training and education, building more defined literacy profiles for students, and making educational pathways more flexible and diverse.
According to the report, educational institutions are, on average, doing well with the provision of education and training. However, immigrants are heterogeneous in terms of their study skills and capabilities, which represents a challenge for development work. Teachers find it difficult to teach heterogeneous groups, and, as the report points out, this problem is difficult to address without differentiated teaching and the necessary additional resources.