Teaching to the track: grouping in reception education for Newly Arrived Migrant students.

Educational tracking has been studied abundantly in previous research. However, the transitions of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) to these (tracked) educational settings are understudied. To facilitate the transition of NAMS to regular secondary education, many countries organise reception classes. This is a separate form of education for NAMS between 12 and 18 years old that immerses them in the language of instruction (i.e. Dutch) and prepares them for participation into regular secondary education. Studying the organisation of reception education is essential to evaluate the inclusiveness of education for NAMS. We take two schools in Flanders (Belgium) as case studies to study in-depth how the grouping of students in reception education influences which track NAMS enter in regular education. Ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in the two schools (2017–2019) and quantitative data on four generations of NAMS (2014–2018) were collected in one of the schools. The five conceptual dimensions of tracking, as developed by Domina et al. (2019. “Beyond Tracking and Detracking: The Dimensions of Organizational Differentiation in Schools.” Sociology of Education 92 (3): 293–322), were used to analyse the data. The results show that the grouping of NAMS has a distinct impact on their transition to the tracked education system.