Abstract
In the Netherlands the idea of mentoring in education has originally been developed by Turkish and Moroccan student organizations. The projects were initiated because migrant parents were largely unable to provide practical support with homework and advise their children with school choices. These scattered projects resulted in a national programme on mentoring by the Ministry of Integration aimed at migrant children at the beginning of the millenium. More recently large foundations like ‘Verre Bergen’ and the Royal Orange Foundation have invested millions into mentor programmes aimed at disadvantaged students. What is needed to make these programmes effective, taking into consideration the challenges of refugee children are facing in education in different European countries?
Bio
Maurice Crul is Professor at the Free University Amsterdam and the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is the international chair of IMISCOE, a network of excellence that includes 38 research institutes in the fields of migration and diversity in 18 European countries: www.imiscoe.org.
In the last twenty years Maurice Crul mostly worked on the topic of education and children of immigrants, first within the Dutch context and in the last ten years in a comparative European and transatlantic context. Maurice Crul coordinated the international TIES project (The Integration of the European Second Generation) which involved partners in eight European countries, and a survey with 10.000 respondents.
Next to coordinating the TIES project he was also one of the principal investigators of the transatlantic project ‘Children of Immigrants in School’. With support of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, Maurice Crul, together with his American colleague John Mollenkopf, published “The Changing Face of World Cities: Young Adult Children of Immigrants in Europe and the United States”.
The TIES project findings revealed that a sizeable group (around twenty percent of our sample) of second generation youth is either pursuing higher education studies or hast already received a diploma of higher education. This finding was the starting point of the new international project called: ‘ELITES: Pathways to Success’. In this project a sub sample of successful second generation from the TIES survey is interviewed about their pathways to success.
In 2017 Maurice Crul was awarded the ERC advanced grant for the project Becoming a Minority (BAM) on the integration of people of native descent in majority minority cities in Europe.