Education coordination for new immigrants

In 2016-2020, vhs Offenbach implemented the "Education Coordination for New Immigrants" project in the Education Coordination and Advice Department. As education coordinator for new immigrants, Nadira Korkor increased the transparency of educational opportunities for this group of people, identified gaps in provision, helped to close them and improved networking in this area.

"The aim of the project was to coordinate the educational offers for new immigrants more closely, to achieve cooperation between all local educational stakeholders and thus improve access to our education and training system. This is the foundation for successful integration," explains Paul-Gerhard Weiß, Head of Education.

With a population of 140,000, Offenbach is a growing city in which immigration is not a new phenomenon. On the contrary: as an "Arrival City", Offenbach has been taking on important integration tasks for the region for many years and has made enormous efforts in daycare centers, schools and adult education to improve the educational opportunities of migrants. "There have also been remarkable and demonstrable successes in the educational progress of children born here to migrant families in particular. However, the increased influx from southern/eastern Europe in recent years, particularly from the EU countries Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia and Greece, has created a new situation to which we need to adapt even better in the education sector," says Paul-Gerhard Weiß. Although Offenbach does not have any refugee allocations, it does have an increasing number of "lateral entrants", i.e. new citizens, most of whom arrive in our education system without any knowledge of German and need to be integrated into it.

Nadira Korkor focused on the situation of new immigrants, their educational needs and access routes to educational institutions in the project. Important fields of action had already emerged from the discussions she held with local education stakeholders at the beginning of the project.

In the area of language support, for example, the aim was to provide new immigrants with a better overview of the variety of offers and to help them find the right one for them. In the field of volunteering, a project was developed and implemented with the Offenbach Volunteer Center to support newly immigrated pupils in the classroom by providing volunteer learning support to help them achieve their educational goals. Another important project was "parent-oriented educational work", the selection, qualification and deployment of "educational mediators" who inform parents in various languages of origin about the German education system and its transitions (e.g. primary school/secondary school). The aim here was also to strengthen parents in supporting their children's education in order to improve their children's educational opportunities. Further information on the fields of action mentioned can be found under the tiles below.

The project position was initially limited to two years, until 2018. It was extended until 30.11.2020. The project position at the vhs was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research via the "Municipal coordination of educational opportunities for new immigrants" program.