ABSTRACT
This journey comes to an end. I must now ask myself what I have learned from it. This investigation set out to explain practices of educational reception, that is, the way secondary schools incorporate recently arrived immigrant students. In the preceding pages we have analysed the implementation of reception policies by schools, examining in particular whether practices comply with or deviate from policies. My search has been theoretically grounded in two rival explanations: the national regimes of integration and the implementation gap. I have used a comparison of reception programmes in Rotterdam and Barcelona in order to study the policy‐practice gap in different institutional settings. My study has confronted two local cases embedded in nation‐states with very different regimes of integration and of education. The central research question was twofold: to what extent do the reception practices of schools comply with the national guidelines on integration? And to what extent is there a gap between policy and practice?
