European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

212 EUROPEAN IDENTITY. INDIVIDUAL, GROUP AND SOCIETYPortuguese children now settled in London appears to be below that oftheir British peers” (cited in Estrela, 2001). Unfortunately, Ana Santos’voice seemed to have been lost for about a quarter of a century.However, it was not totally silenced. In 1999 Paulo Abrantes, Directorof the Portuguese Department of Basic Education (Lisbon), decided tocommission the current project based on the Portuguese teachers’views that a substantial number of Portuguese children wereexperiencing difficulties in their mainstream schools. When we startedthis project in 1999 one of the aspects that astonished us was the lackof research conducted with the Portuguese community in Britain. Thisabsence is in a sharp contrast with the vast amount of researchconducted with other migrant groups, even when they are relatively ofa similar size. This is an issue that deserves serious reflection. The lackof written documentation on the Portuguese population was notexclusive to academic work. The same situation applied to statisticsabout education. In these statistics the Portuguese are grouped asWhite Europeans. In fact, they can be counted in two categoriesdepending upon whether they classify themselves as White or OtherEthnic (Abreu, Silva and Lambert, 2001a).As one can expect in these situations, the statistical data weanalysed did not paint a unique and homogeneous pattern. The gapsbetween the Portuguese students and other students varied between,between schools in the same area, and within schools (detailed inAbreu, Silva and Lambert, 2001a). So, of course, there were alsostudents achieving the targets for their age group. However, it wasclear that the major trend across all areas was one that pointed outunderachievement. Nevertheless, the specific socio-cultural conditionswhich could help us to understand this dominant pattern (and also ofthose who deviate from it by being successful) were totally unclear. Wemust confess that we were not prepared to accept the cultural“deficit” explanations often mentioned by teachers in our visits toschools. This was totally against the socio-cultural approach to learningthat we have been developing from our previous studies (see forinstance Abreu, 2002).Though educators tend to argue that the problem is temporary andmainly due to lack of language fluency, studies with the Portuguese inCanada seriously question this assumption. The case of Canada isparticularly interesting because it provides an insight into the future ifthe problems of under-achievement that remain invisible and neglected.Similarly to England, the community has been largely invisible. However,they have recognised the need to look at the situation of the Portuguesestudents more than a decade ago. The reports of the Toronto Board of