Global families, local schools

As debates about integration continue, Kelly Draper Rasmussen analyses the quiet shift of international families into local Danish schools.

Photographs: Pixabay: StockSnap / Kelly Draper Rasmussen

Text: Kelly Draper Rasmussen

When Danish industry and municipalities discuss attracting international workers, they often assume that such families need international schools with instruction in English. However, international families are increasingly choosing schools with Danish as the language of instruction, and the preference is growing amongst families from Western backgrounds. In fact, among children with Western backgrounds, three-quarters attend their local folkeskole, while the remainder attend other types of school, of which international schools are a small subset.

The challenge of measuring “International” in Danish data

Researching the topic of ‘international children’ using publicly available data is complicated by some fairly large data gaps. In Sweden, their open-source data notes whether a person has one or two foreign parents and whether they were born in Sweden or abroad. The Danish data sources are more binary. Someone is either Danish or international (immigrant or descendant), so the trends among mixed families are indetectable in the available data.

The structure of the Danish school system

Denmark has two main phases of school: primary (6-15 years old) and secondary (15-18 years old). Within the primary phase, there are a few options. There is the local school (folkeskole), private school (friskole), boarding school for teenagers (efterskole), and a variety of special schools.

Rising numbers and shifting patterns

Using those definitions, around 106,000 international pupils attend Danish primary schools today (26,000 Western, 80,000 non-Western). Both groups predominantly choose folkeskole. But the patterns are shifting and converging. Tracking the data since 2007, we can see not only that the population of primary school-aged international students is increasing, but also that folkeskole is becoming much more popular.

International schools

In the past two decades, many new international schools have opened (of which only three are international folkeskoler). Copenhagen and its satellite kommuner have around a dozen international schools. Nevertheless, the trend is for Western families increasingly to send their children to folkeskole. This could be for many reasons, and it is not clear from the data what they are. There might not be any choice, perhaps there is no space at the international school or none available locally. They could also be hoping to boost their children’s Danish skills and local community links. Or it could be because it is free.

The share of Western children attending folkeskole, as opposed to any other school, has increased from 70% to 75%, but in absolute terms, the number of students has quadrupled from 5,000 to nearly 20,000.

A planning blind spot

This tendency is fascinating, not least because it is not discussed at the planning level when Danish organisations dream of attracting and retaining more international workers. The assumption is that these children will be siloed in international schools. Still, of course, if families are choosing the local alternative, then those schools must plan to invest in resources to help children with different mother tongues master Danish.

“Three-quarters of Western children now attend their local folkeskole - not an international school.”

Non-Western families and the rise of friskoler

In terms of non-Western families (these are somewhat arbitrary groups; this one includes all of Asia, Africa, South America, some of North America and the non-EU European nations), the vast majority of children with these backgrounds attend folkeskole; only one in five attended an alternative to folkeskole in 2025. However, this is down from 86% in 2007, and the shift is explained by non-Western families increasingly choosing friskoler.

There is also a trend of more children attending special schools. Still, this trend is largely the same for international children of all backgrounds, since 2007, diagnosis and identification have improved significantly for many special educational needs. Interestingly, international children are slightly more likely to attend special schools than Danish children. That could be an interesting study into the mechanisms at play.

The reason for non-Western families increasingly choosing friskoler is also fascinating. Is it a trend of long-term international families moving their children to private schools, or are we seeing that many more middle-class Indian and Chinese families are settling here and that international schools are their preference?

Challenging the public narrative on bilingual children

For international families weighing up the options, you would not be the only ones sending your child to the local school. What could be interesting is discussing the nuances of the situation in the public sphere. Most of the discussion about tosprogede (bilingual) children assumes they are all from the Middle East. The discussion misses the point, since we literally do not have figures on how many Danish children have one international parent, and that, increasingly, children from many other continents and diverse backgrounds are attending their local schools.

Diversity as a classroom resource

From my own experience as a teacher, having a diverse linguistic and cultural background to draw from in the classroom is no barrier to learning. Quite the opposite, it is a resource. You can use children’s home languages to make learning more relevant and sticky; for example, when teaching science, some vocabulary based on Greek or Latin can be inscrutable until a classmate explains that it is the same as in their language. Having different cultures in the room is also helpful when teaching perspective-taking and critical thinking.

But to use these educational techniques, you need to know they exist. If the political assumption is that all classrooms are homogenously Danish outside the ghetto and homogenously Middle Eastern inside, then schools might not be able to access resources and training to include all types of learners in their classrooms.

The debate must catch up with reality

One thing is clear. The change has already occurred, and the debate must move on in order to cater for these learners.