School success for migrant and refugee children: a systematic literature review

In less than a decade, conflicts have driven two massive waves of refugees to the European Union, mainly from Syria and Ukraine but not only. Many of these refugees are children whose education has been disrupted. This article aims to identify the elements that foster school success for migrant and refugee children in their host societies. To investigate this, we conducted a systematic review following the PRISMA statement, focusing on three databases: Elsevier’s Scopus, Clarivate’s Social Sciences Citation Index, and Emerging Sources Citation Index. Our search yielded 651 articles, with no restriction on publication date. After a rigorous inclusion and exclusion process conducted independently by different researchers, 38 articles related to the education of refugee and migrant children and families were fully screened. Ultimately, 30 articles were included in the review, and their methodological quality was assessed independently by two researchers. The analysis, conducted deductively, highlights the importance of establishing interactive learning environments for students, involving the community in the educational process, and designing effective training for teachers and other professionals to manage the educational trajectories of these young people. In the final section, we discuss the limitations of this study and suggest areas for further exploration.