Street-Level Bureaucrats As Welfare State Tools For Inclusion Of Migrant Pupils

In the 1970s, practitioners took lead in contouring the reception for newly arrived migrant pupils in the Danish primary and lower secondary school through experiments with different approaches (Buchardt, 2016; Padovan-Özdemir, 2016). Both nationally and locally, these experiments and bottom-up initiatives were politically celebrated as an alternative to rigid legislation and as another tenet in municipal self-government (Ramsing Enemark and Buchardt, in process). As immigration and integration politics grew more contested in the 1990s, the nationally elastic policy design can also be viewed as obscuring potentially unpopular policy choices (Brodkin & Marston, 2013) and as a means to border welfare distribution (Buchardt, 2018). Because the reception of newly arrived migrant pupils is a municipal matter, local government and the street-level bureaucrats administering it became de facto policymakers. In this way, street-level bureaucrats become sites for politically contested policy projects (Lipsky, 2010; Pierson, 1997). This paper is based on observations, interviews, research literature and public policy documents as materials. It seeks to unfold how street-level bureaucrats historically came to embody this function for newly arrived migrant pupils from the 1970s and onwards. I go on to analyze how contemporary street-level bureaucrats in municipalities and schools manage and experience this role in the 2020s, by asking: “How have teachers, school leaders and civil servants used their discretion in reception practices towards newly arrived migrant pupils in Danish schools?”. By investigating their use of discretion through the classification and framing of policy texts, I show how varied and locally adjusted reception practices can be and discuss potential policy implications. Street-level bureaucrats’ high degree of autonomy leaves them with a sizeable task and responsibility, which has direct and extensive consequences for newly arrived migrant pupils’ experiences of the Danish school.