Extended basic education programme for newly arrived migrant students in Norway

The extended basic education programme in Norway was initiated to promote integration, majority language acquisition and academic achievement of newly arrived migrant students (NAMSs) as a preparation for mainstream upper secondary education. Theoretically rooted in critical policy analysis and empirically based on semi-structured interviews with principals and programme leaders in three schools in Oslo, the study aims at exploring how these major policy actors understand and discursively construct their NAMSs and their own institutional space. Furthermore, we explore and analyse the impact of these constructions on the enactment of the EBEP policy. Prevalence of minoritized students in mainstream classes and in the programme constitutes a defining principle of discursive construction of the students as a different and challenging group, and schools as segregated. The programme itself is discursively constructed as incapacitated to ensure attainment of the policy goals. Thus, the students’ background, the schools’ social-cultural contexts and the programme’s steering policy are understood and discursively constructed as constraints that hinder rather than promote its goals. Taken combined, these discursive constructions are turned into a foundation for the policy enactment. In its practical consequences, the programme further exacerbates the very problems it was set to remedy.