MiFamily is an Erasmus + project (2017-2019) gathering 7 organisations in 5 EU countries: UK (coordinator & partners), Spain (two partners), France, Romania and Ireland. Students with a migrant background may face language challenges if the national language of the host country is not one they speak on arrival. Parents with migrant background may have diverse profiles. On the one hand, some of them may be fluent in the language of the host country but still speak another language at home. On the other hand, some parents may have language challenges that are affecting their integration and therefore would need a linguistic support. Among their children, in the process of acquisition of the national language, teachers have a major role to play even though they recognize that handling cultural diversity in the classroom is a main issue. Most of the teachers working in sensitive urban issues (characterized by a high proportion of migrant population) feel they need more professional support to deal with a multicultural environment. Linguistic and cultural diversity at school, is important in Southern Europe – such as Italy and Spain but also in specific areas of Northern Europe such as United Kingdom, Belgium and also in France in the so-called urban sensitive areas characterized by a high poverty rate combining high unemployment rate, mainly low qualified inhabitants, with a high proportion of migrant families facing linguistic issues.

Children in migrant families are key actors in the process of integration as they are frequently called upon to bridge language and cultural gaps in understanding between members of the host community and their own families. Both teachers and migrant families are most concerned by migrant students´ success at school. The more their parents are aware of the importance of education and understand the school system the better they are equipped to support their children at school as underlined by PISA studies. Even though migrant parents have high expectations for their children, they are faced with many obstacles – mainly language and social barriers or low understanding of the host country’s system of schooling. Lack of time or money to invest in their child´s education maybe a major issue in disadvantaged areas even though alternative solutions, based on voluntary initiatives (free service) are offered by many associations, with community volunteers, endeavor to support children and there are various degrees of public support within school- many EU projects have underlined this point especially in the School education field. Therefore, the MiFamily approach presents a win-win situation:

1- for professionals, this is an opportunity to involve migrant parents in the “formal” education of their children;

2- for migrant families, they can be better equipped by means of non-formal and informal learning to support their children’s progress through the host country’s education system thanks to the innovative approach of the family learning process

This first intellectual output is aimed at designing a training curriculum addressing teachers, school leaders and educators from organisations with migrants for providing a relevant support to migrant parents