The Perceived Needs of the Remigrant Pupils

In the era of globalisation and international migration, a new phenomenon becomes more and more present in educational and social systems across Europe: remigrants, children returning home (with or without their families) after a shorter or longer period spent abroad. In some countries, the remigrants are becoming an important minority in schools; for instance, in Romania, as many as 150-180.000 remigrants are enrolled in the public educational system. In this paper, we did not focus on identifying the specific needs of the remigrant children, as they were analysed in previous researches; our objective was to identify the specific ways that native children and their teachers perceive the psychological, social and cultural, educational needs of the remigrants, as the response from the educational system is more often based on this perception than on the actual needs. The research methodology was based on a quantitative approach, with questionnaires administered to native pupils and teachers in four European countries (Romania, Italy, Portugal and North Macedonia) to also investigate the cross-country differences in social perception of the specific needs of remigrant children. Our results argued that the social perception of the needs of the remigrants are different in each country, reflecting their cultural specificity and showing that intervention should be adapted to each cultural and educational system in order to actually facilitate the reintegration of the remigrants. Also, our results showed that the psychological, educational, social and cultural needs of the remigrants are more obvious for teachers compared with native pupils, arguing that any intervention to support the remigrants should consider specific activities to make native children aware of the difficulties their peers returning from abroad have to face in order to motivate them into joining this systemic intervention.