Parents, Pupils, Pedagogues, and Policies: A Rectangle of School Education for Immigrant’s Children

The research explores issues surrounding entry into a public school for children of Bengali-speaking supposedly “Bangladeshi immigrant” community in a part of Hindi-speaking India. Using the Grounded Theory approach, we conducted in-depth interviews with multiple stakeholders. We reviewed relevant policies and extant literature to understand the field's emerging narrative. Drawing upon the social constructivist framework to analyse the patterns in the data, we found four categories: (1) Parent’s decision and child’s education, (2) Procedural burden, (3) Child’s fear and emotions, and (4) Teachers’ perceptions and obligations. The findings reveal that accessing public education by immigrant children is more complicated than the structural limitations, parental involvement, teacher’s quality, and infrastructural issues as found in the past research. Importantly, different interpretations of circumstances and convenient adoption of a rationale by various stakeholders led to multiple realities, which eventually impacted children's participation in public school. The study complements the access theory by showing how a socially constructed worldview could enable or disable access to a specific community. The study suggests critical policy implications at the policy executives’ level if an ‘idealistic’ macro-level policy to be fully translated into ground reality.