More needs to be done to ease the difficulties facing refugees if they are to reach their potential in the UK, according to the first major piece of research into the government’s resettlement scheme.

Academics from the University of Sussex are close to completing a three-year study that has followed the progress of more than 280 refugees who came the UK before 2010 under the Gateway protection programme.

Researchers compared the integration and wellbeing of refugees from Ethiopia, Iraq, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, living in four areas of the UK. Their findings reveal how the system is failing some of the most vulnerable members of society through inadequacies in the provision of English classes and a lack of suitable routes to employment and training.

The study, Optimising Refugee Resettlement in the UK, found women, along with teenagers who had missed core education because of turmoil in their home country, faced the biggest barriers to integration.

The findings are timely as the first of the 20,000 Syrians that former prime minister David Cameron pledged in 2015 to bring from the camps bordering Syria by 2020 have arrived in the UK. By June this year more than 2,500 had come under the Syrian vulnerable person resettlement scheme, which is based on the Gateway programme. They are selected from a country of safety based on vulnerability and those eligible are given refugee status prior to arriving in Britain, where they are settled in groups of 60 to 100 people. The government is under scrutiny over their progress.

Linda Morrice, a senior lecturer in education at Sussex University who carried out part of the analysis with colleagues specialising in geography and psychology, says language was both the key and the barrier to indicators of wellbeing and success.

“Overwhelmingly we found people wanted to learn the language and found that this was absolutely vital to their integration, work and independence. More than anything they wanted to have a plan and a future here.”

But problems arose because the government tends to use a “one size fits all model”, she adds. “We’ve found this is really not suitable for many people.”

Syrian refugee families arrive at their new homes on the Isle of Bute in December 2015. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The research focused on refugees aged from 18 to 80 who had been settled in Brighton and Hove, Manchester, Sheffield and Norwich. They were asked to rate their own English understanding, speaking, reading and writing and the improvement of their language proficiency since arrival on a scale of one to five. “To investigate the importance of learning the language we then explored links between people’s self-rated English and other variables,” Morrice explains.

The results show that people with better English skills are more satisfied with their job and education and have a better understanding of British culture. Because participants filled out the questionnaires three times, each time a year apart, researchers were able to conduct longitudinal analysis and learned that language skills are needed for meaningful contact rather than vice versa.

“Although the assumption is if you are living in England you will come into contact with British people and over time learn the language, it actually happens the other way around,” Morrice says. “We want to emphasise that refugees cannot be expected to learn English simply through contact with English speakers. Our results clearly show language skills are needed before meaningful contacts can be made and that this in turn increases refugee wellbeing.”

Up to 750 refugees a year have been brought to the UK under the Gateway scheme since its inception in 2004. The scheme does not accept asylum seekers who have travelled to the UK under their own steam.

Someone who has never learned to read can find themselves sitting next to a person with a university degree

But the University of Sussex study found there was a huge diversity within these groups and subsequently considerable variations in need and integration outcomes.

Academics recorded that this was particularly problematic when it came to learning English. Resettled refugees are given eight hours a week of free English for speakers of other languages (Esol) tuition in the first year they arrive, grouped with others of the same nationality. This is cut to four hours a week in subsequent years for those claiming jobseeker’s allowance when they enter mainstream provision. As a result, someone who has never held a pen or learned to read can find themselves sitting next to another person with a university degree who can already speak some English. In interviews one refugee said: “It’s easy to learn the language – I went to the library, I looked online, I watched English films.” Another was still using an interpreter after attending English classes for nine years. She said: “I just want to be able to go to the doctor on my own. I want some privacy. I want to read my own letters.” For many the lessons are not intensive or frequent enough, while others would be better suited to learning through craft or cookery classes and one-to-one mentoring, the study found.

Last year the government announced £45m of cuts to the free Esol tuition, which will affect more than 16,000 people. While £10m of funding is to be injected over five years to ensure adequate Esol in areas where Syrian refugees are to be settled, experts have said targeting such a small group is not an effective approach.

“Feedback provided by refugees suggested their English improved at a greater pace when they were put in mixed classes with other nationalities, otherwise there was a tendency to speak in their native tongue. Mixed classes also bridged ties between communities,” Morrice says. She adds that the classes need to be tailored more carefully to the needs of specific groups, especially women. Women were found to have lower language skills, and for them childcare and caring for sick relatives were major barriers to learning English.

Refugees being given an English lesson by the FaithAction charity in London, December 2015. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

The study also found refugees who came to the UK with qualifications and good English skills faced a different set of problems. Often overseas qualifications are not recognised and there is a lack of faster-track learning routes, especially when it came to support with finding employment commensurate with their previous work.

Things are even tougher for those described by researchers as “the lost teenagers”, who arrive in their mid to late teens having missed the vital final years of school because, for example, they were in a refugee camp. Many of those interviewed said they wanted to study vocations such as construction, hairdressing or plumbing or were keen to go to university but did not have GCSE maths or English. Yet too much focus was put on finding a job rather than training and aspirations.

A young man, living in Manchester, wrote: “Nobody cares about my future, they only want me to get a job and quit the jobcentre.” Another described how he “performed gymnastics” to subvert the system to get the qualifications he needed.

James (not his real name) arrived in the UK to live in Norwich after fleeing war in the DRC. His studies were interrupted after his family sought refuge in Uganda and he missed four years of education before arriving in Britain, aged 21.

He says when he registered at the jobcentre he got an interview for a job as a cleaner but was turned down because he had no cleaning experience. “All I wanted to do was study and go to university,” he says.

Out of the other refugees who were resettled at the same time as me nobody else my age has managed to go to university

He finally managed to get a job as a care worker but later quit so he could juggle English classes with doing an access course and completing his GCSEs. He was forced to lie about the amount of time he was spending studying, as no more than 16 hours of study a week is permitted while claiming jobseeker’s allowance. Now 30 and married with two children, James has completed his first degree at university and is taking a master’s.

“Out of the other refugees who were resettled at the same time as me nobody else my age has managed to go to university,” he says. “There should be more support for young people to get the qualifications they need. If I had told the jobcentre I was studying for 18 hours a week I wouldn’t have been able to do the access course to do my GCSEs.”

Lucy Bryson is Brighton and Hove council’s community safety manager and its lead officer on refugees. She has been coordinating the package of support for eight Syrian households who have been resettled in the area since December 2015. “The best way for any refugee household to integrate and feel a sense of belonging in the UK is for someone in that household to be working,” she explains. “Refugees come to the UK with skills and experience, so it may be only the lack of English language which gets in the way.”

She urges the government to use the findings of the Sussex study to improve its policy on resettling refugees. “This research underlines how important good quality language provision is, tailored to the skills and aspirations of each individual,” she says.

The Department for Education last year part-funded Esol courses for more than 130,000 learners. A DfE spokeswoman says: “We are fully committed to equipping people with the necessary English language skills to succeed in work, and play an active role in their communities. We aim to create a fair balance between the investment made by the government, the employer and the individual.”

Case studies: ‘I used to cry when I had to talk to someone’



Makida is a 40-year-old mother of three living in Brighton who fled Ethiopia because of political upheaval. She has attended English classes since she arrived in the UK 10 years ago, but found the language hard to learn and often missed classes to care for her sick mother.

Makida, who runs a catering company with her husband

She needed to use a translator for a long time and said she also struggled with self-confidence when trying to communicate in public. “I used to cry when I had to talk to someone,” she explains. “It’s the way I was brought up; it wasn’t really respectful [in Ethiopia] to go up and talk to somebody, because I’m a woman.”

Makida says it was only once she started having home tuition two years ago, in addition to her Esol classes, that she gained confidence and started to pick up English.

She now runs a catering company with her husband, making Ethiopian food for community events, and has made friends with her neighbours: “In the past couple of years I’ve got to know an Albanian woman who lives a few doors down. We drink coffee and speak English together every day.”

Yared, who was a high court judge in Ethiopia, now works as a traffic warden

Yared, 55, was a high court judge in Ethiopia, but community tensions led him to flee with his family to a refugee camp in Kenya 17 years ago. They lived in Nairobi for seven years before being selected for resettlement to Britain on the Gateway programme. Arriving in the UK, he applied for 30 or 40 jobs before finding work as a traffic warden – a post he’s been in for seven years.

He says he is grateful to have the job, but adds: “I have so much experience from all my years … but instead I’m doing work that just brings confrontation. I get abused and beaten. You see British people at their worst. It makes me depressed.”

Sometimes the abuse has been racist. Earlier this year a man was taken to court after assaulting Yared and telling him to “go home”. However, Yared says most people are friendly and he has made friends in the local community.

He has supported both his daughters through university, but has struggled to become a human rights lawyer. He took a law conversion course at Brighton University and went on to do a postgraduate course, but was unable to complete the qualification as he could not afford the fee to have his dissertation marked by an external assessor. “I need £3,000 to attain my qualification … As a refugee I’m not allowed to take out a loan,” he says.

“My daughter is a lawyer. She says: ‘Why don’t you quit your job? I’ll help you, Dad.’ But I don’t want to go through the benefits cycle again and I need the money to support my other daughter who is a single mum. She needs extra help with her council tax.”

Feedback from Yared, and others like him, shows that even when refugees are qualified for a job, it is hard to engage employers, because of their lack of UK qualifications or work experience.