Almost every other pupil with a migrant background performs badly at school, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said on Monday. In a new study, a secondary analysis of the OECD's 2015 PISA education assessment, OECD analyzed school performance of more than 500,000 15-year-olds from different economic zones in 72 countries. 

The study also found that children with a foreign background were less satisfied with their lives in general, compared with their non-migrant peers.

Migration changing composition of classrooms

One fourth of the students assessed had at least one parent with a foreign background. Between 2003 and 2015, the share of students in OECD countries who had either migrated or who had a parent who had migrated across international borders grew by six percentage points.

Germany in particular has experienced a large increase in migrant pupils due to the refugee crisis, which saw over one million migrants enter the country, including many children. Every tenth student in Germany currently has no German passport.

The OECD found that academic underperformance among migrant students in Germany is particularly pronounced. Socio-economic disadvantage and language barriers were two of the greatest obstacles, the organization said, stressing that low performance could not be attributed to a lack of motivation. In fact, the OECD found that students with a migrant background proved to be more eager to learn than their native peers.

Migrant children in Germany also often felt marginalized in class, the study said. Concerning their futures, they were less optimistic. Only one out of four migrant students in Germany expected to achieve a university degree. This is below the OECD average of 41 percent and the EU average of 37 percent.

Persistent disadvantage

Children of immigrants who are new to the country face various barriers linked to the fact that they have been raised and educated in a different environment and education system, and they may not have the same command of the host language as native speakers. Children of immigrants who are native-born, on the other hand, have different social preconditions. However, evidence by the OECD suggests that these children also lag behind in school performance and social mobility later on. This was especially the case for children of non-EU parents. 

This is often due to the fact that the parents do not speak the language or come from a low educational background. How well they are integrated overall also effects how well their children do at school, the OECD found in a related study called Catching Up? Intergenerational Mobility and Children of Immigrants. 

While poor social mobility has proven to be an intergenerational phenomenon, research also found that the number of years immigrant parents have spent in the host country positively affects the educational outcomes of their children.

The OECD stressed that helping immigrant parents "to be fully and autonomously functional in the host country society is not only important for the immigrants themselves but is also an important precondition for better outcomes of their children."