Wartime paths to and experiences of Swedish education : A study of Ukrainian refugees with school-aged children in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Transnational population migration is a multifaceted phenomenon that has been shaping human history and continues to shape the world today. War and conflict are among the major drivers of forced migration. The full-scale war waged by Russia on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 caused an unprecedented mass migration of the Ukrainian population with millions of refugees scattered across Europe. This study explores migration decisions, education strategies, and experiences of Ukrainian wartime refugees with school-aged children in Sweden. Taking a qualitative approach and following the sociological tradition of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the study examines what considerations determined the families’ decisions to leave Ukraine and seek refuge in Sweden; how the families navigate the Swedish school system and perceive the changes in their children’s education trajectories caused by the war and migration; and how various forms of the families’ capital shape the children’s migration and education trajectories in wartime. Data collection involved 20 qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with parents of school-aged children who left Ukraine after 24 February 2022 and at the time of data collection, were living in Sweden. The findings reveal the following: (1) migration decisions of the families were driven by the perceived immediate threat to life and physical integrity for some, and by the increasing uncertainty caused by the war for others; (2) their routes to Sweden were to a great extent determined by the earlier accumulated social capital in the form of personal contacts, but also by work-related arrangements, and by random volunteers encountered in other European countries; (3) at the time of heading to Sweden, the country was widely perceived by the families as a child-friendly destination; (4) the families’ practices of navigating the Swedish school system appear to depend on the volume and composition of their capital and can be categorised as the Proactive, the Reliant, and the Oblivious; (5) the families’ perceptions of the changes in their children’s education trajectories caused by the war and migration are characterised by ambivalence leading to some of the children’s “double schooling” in Sweden and in Ukraine as the families struggle to establish and/or maintain their social standing in both countries. The study is among the first to explore the migration decisions and experiences of Ukrainian refugees in the context of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, and, to the best of our knowledge, the first to explore the experiences of Ukrainian refugee families of Swedish schools. It adds to the existing body of literature on the forced migration and education of refugee children by shedding light on the lived experiences of transitioning from one education system to the other at a time of war and uncertainty.