Education

Education is essential for immigrants to be integrated into the labour market and for them to become an integrated part of society as a whole. It does not seem as if immigrants fully utilise their educational qualifications from their home country, just like they to a lesser extent than Danes get an education in Denmark. In a situation where the qualification demands on the labour market are tightened this is a serious problem. AKF's research within the field of education of ethnic minorities includes for instance:

• educational drop-out rate among young immigrants
• effectiveness of language teaching
• the importance of an education from the home country.

The large drop-out rate

Descendants and foreigners who have come to Denmark at the age of 0-5 begin on a youth education to almost the same extent as young Danes. But far fewer immigrants finish a youth education. The main problem is the drop-out rate on the vocational educations where about 60% of the young immigrants drop out. This problem is mainly due to insufficient educational knowledge, lack of parental resources and poor possibilities of getting a training place.

Danish language lessons

Language skills and also the effectiveness of the Danish language lessons are of great importance for the integration. AKF's research shows that there is a big difference in the effectiveness of the language centres, also when taking differences in the participant composition in the language schools into account.

Education from home country

Quite a lot of immigrants have an education from their home country. An important question is to which extent the education from the home country is utilised in Denmark. AKF's research shows that it only happens to some extent. This might be due to the fact that some educations cannot be directly transferred to Denmark (e.g. law), that the quality of an education, despite an identical name, does not correspond to a Danish education, that there is discrimination on the labour market etc.