Category Archives: Interviews

Learning materials, language support, and cultural mediators, these are a few of the elements of Iceland’s efforts to create a more welcoming and inclusive education that Fríða Bjarney Jónsdóttir discusses in the second part of this interview. In the first part of this conversation with Thomas Hatch, Jónsdóttir outlined some of the first steps Iceland has taken to establish their national approach. Jónsdóttir works as a specialist at the Ministry of Education and Children coordinating the MEMM project an abbreviation for education, welcoming and culture. The project  is being developed in close collaboration with the Centre for Language and Literacy in Reykjavík and the newly established national Directorate of Education and School Services. Previously Jónsdóttir was the head of the Center for Innovation at Reykjavík’s Department of Education and Youth and before that served as a coordinator for multicultural education in preschools. For earlier coverage of developments in Iceland’s education system see part 1 and part 2 of a conversation with Jón Torfi Jónasson “On the inertia of education systems and hope for the future” and “Relish the freedom you have and find the balance.”

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Thomas Hatch: You’ve talked about some of the major initiatives you’re pursuing now including the collaboration around the data system, the production of resources and curriculum for inclusive education, and the development of a group of cultural mediators who can help educators and schools address the needs of immigrant families. But what about the challenges? What are some of the issues you need to deal with in order for your work to be successful? 

Fríða Bjarney Jónsdóttir: One of the issues is that Icelandic is a really tiny language. It doesn’t have much global value. As a result, you might have parents who’ve been living in Iceland for years and years without learning Icelandic. They could be working in the tourist industry, for example, but the company owners don’t care whether their staff speak Icelandic or not. There is a policy to support the learning of Icelandic as a second language, but it’s not acted on, and everyone needs to take responsibility for that. 

We need to provide an Icelandic learning community to support learning the language, and one way we are trying to do that is through continuous education. In almost every corner of Iceland, you have a center where you can go and you can learn all sorts of things, including instruction in Icelandic. But there’s no standardized syllabus, and we don’t have standardized learning material. 

TH: So that’s part of the reason you are trying to create the resources and materials for more effective instruction for Icelandic as a second language? 

FBJ: Yes, we’re doing that for the pre-primary, primary and secondary levels, but ideally it would happen for continuing education as well. It should happen at all levels. Just to give you an example, I was in a municipality where almost 70% of the children in the schools have an immigrant background. I told them, “Okay, you want us to do something about the schools and the education of the children, but what is the welcoming plan of the municipality? How do you welcome newcomers into your municipality?” This can’t be just about the schools.  There has to be a plan for how the community welcomes newcomers that includes both the municipality and the schools. 

“How do you welcome newcomers into your municipality?” This can’t be just about the schools.  There has to be a plan for how the community welcomes newcomers that includes both the municipality and the schools.”

Reykjavik has that kind of plan. The idea for their welcoming plan actually started in the Reykjavik Youth Council. That Council includes kids who are 14 to 18, and they can create proposals and appeals for the City Council to consider. They participate in one meeting with the City Council to put their ideas forward, and the City Council accepts some of the appeals.  The ideas that are accepted are sent to the relevant department, like the city’s Department of Education and Youth or the Department of Welfare. 

Back in 2015, I was leading the multicultural team at the Department of Education in Reykjavik, and the Youth Council introduced this idea about how the neighborhood could welcome newcomers. I thought it was so interesting that the youth council was bringing this up, so I called them all in and said “I want to hear the story behind your idea.” This guy who was already in upper secondary school, I think he was 17 at the time, said he was Icelandic, and he was living in a neighborhood in Reykjavik, where you have the most immigrants. “I’ve been in the same school for 10 years,” he told me, “and I’ve been having kids coming in my class every year that don’t speak Icelandic. For many, many years, I was with the same boy from Poland, and no one taught me how to talk to him. I feel so guilty about that, and I wanted to do something about it.” That was the beginning. Now there is a collaboration between the schools and a service center in the four districts of the city. This approach has been implemented in all the districts in Reykjavik, but it’s not something that’s happened nationally. One service center situated in the most diverse district has  “ambassadors” that have been appointed from about 9 or 10 immigrant groups. The ambassadors act as consultants to the service center to help them improve their services, and they serve as a link to the immigrant groups in the district. There are some municipalities, like, the municipality closest to the airport where they have been doing wonderful work, that we can all learn from, but it’s not exactly the same in each place. 

I also remember this wonderful welcoming plan that was in the East fjords some years ago where they had a welcoming person who met all new families. It didn’t matter where they came from, she met all the new families a few days after they moved to the town; gave them a card for the library, visited the pool, showed them where the social services were, and took them to the schools.  Now, when I visit other places, I point out to them that you cannot do this in isolation, and you can build on these examples from Reykjavik and these other municipalities.  

TH: You’ve talked here about welcoming immigrants, but in many cases, with refugees in particular, you’re welcoming people who’ve experienced trauma. How have you addressed that?

FBJ: This is something that we are learning little by little. I know in the US you have had trauma sensitive education and other initiatives that we have not had here, but it’s coming. We have a project we are working on now, Heillaspor that’s nationwide for Icelandic schools. It’s based on a Scottish project called Nurture. That’s an inclusive trauma sensitive project based on attachment theory: How do you build relationships and connections between adults and children? Between the children themselves? Between children and families? Between families and schools? And how can you support teachers in protecting themselves, their emotions and feelings so that they become less fragile in difficult situations? 

“How do you build relationships and connections between adults and children? Between the children themselves? Between children and families? Between families and schools? And how can you support teachers in protecting themselves, their emotions and feelings so that they become less fragile in difficult situations?”

But we also have some local projects. One that I have visited is developing micro-initiatives to support children and families who having huge challenges, in terms of finances, parents with drug addiction, children not going to school and all that. One of the initiatives that they are implementing, is called SPARE (It stands for supporting parents among refugees in Europe). They provide a 12-week program for parents with a refugee background and provide clinical therapies. 

TH: Are there any other major challenges that you’re facing? 

FBJ: There are so many challenges! The dominance of English is another challenge for teaching Icelandic as a second language. English is almost the lingua franca in Iceland so there’s a fight to keep the Icelandic language alive. My background is in multicultural, multilingual pedagogy, so when I’m working with multilingual children and families, I build on the strengths and resources that they bring to the school. For example, I will try to activate their languages while teaching them Icelandic. I will try to learn about our similarities and our differences. But that’s becoming a challenge because English is the language that everyone is using, so, for many teachers, it’s easier to speak English to newcomers. Teachers who are responsible for teaching Icelandic as a second language only work with a child for a few hours a week outside the regular classroom, and there is not a focus on building relationships through Icelandic with the classmates. As a result, there is a danger that the  child goes back into the regular class and never practices Icelandic. That’s why we are also trying to change attitudes and beliefs and make it clear that learning Icelandic as a second language is a joint responsibility of the whole school not only the appointed second language teacher. 

But this work has to deal with the increased racism, hate speech, extremism, and polarization that you are seeing in the US and Europe as well. This certainly makes it difficult when you want to work in an inclusive way with cultures and languages. As one example, I gave a course for all the head teachers of preschools in one of the neighborhoods in Reykjavik. I talked about attitudes and beliefs and what inclusion means. What does it mean to be culturally sensitive? They did all sorts of projects and discussions about this, because you can provide all sorts of material and support, but if people don’t work with themselves and their own beliefs and attitudes, things hardly change. We see this as a huge, huge, huge challenge. This is an issue everywhere, but at least the policy here is in favor of multilingualism and multiculturalism. 

The education of teachers is another huge challenge. Icelandic society has changed very, very fast, and teacher education is struggling to keep up with the pace of societal changes. We don’t have a good knowledge of how to teach Icelandic as a second language, for example. We have to build up that knowledge, and we also have to build up the knowledge of culturally and linguistically sensitive practices and our projects are trying to contribute to that. 

TH: Is there anything that’s been successful in working on teacher education? Any area where progress is being made? 

FBJ: There are some good initiatives at our universities for teacher education, and you have teachers that really want to change things. We are working with many different groups, including representatives from the universities, the teachers’ union, the Association of Municipalities, and we are having meetings about teacher education. You could say, we have “opened the mic.” There is also a recent book about teacher education in the Nordic countries when it comes to multilingual children, and there are two chapters about teacher education in Iceland (Teacher education for working in linguistically diverse classrooms: Nordic perspectives). 

TH: All this gives us a great sense of the initiatives you’ve gotten started. Is there anything else that you see coming down the line or that you’re hoping to get going as next steps? 

FBJ: We have less than year to go with this project, and it’s supposed to finish with a draft for the parliament that describes what we want support for school services and support to the municipalities to look like. At the same time, I hope we would get some kind of a consensus between the state and the municipalities:  What is the responsibility of the state? What are the responsibilities of the municipalities? And how are we going to divide the cost? This work has been going on for a while. I think that now we know the challenges. We know what we have to do. We have a lot of resources, but we need this collaboration, and we need a systemic approach so we can work on this together. 

Part of what I’m trying to do during these two years is influence attitudes and change how people view working with culturally and linguistically diverse groups of children so everyone sees that it’s not a matter of fixing someone; it’s not a matter of a single teacher being responsible. We as a society are responsible for building on the resources that people bring and providing them the education they need to live here. That’s where I would like to see us.

“it’s not a matter of a single teacher being responsible. We as a society are responsible for building on the resources that people bring and providing them the education they need to live here.”

What does it take to create a safe and welcoming environment for all learners? Fríða Bjarney Jónsdóttir discusses Iceland’s efforts to create a more inclusive and systemic approach to supporting immigrants and multilingual learners in the first part of this interview with Thomas Hatch. Part two of the interview will discuss some of the key challenges these initiatives have to address in order to be successful. Jónsdóttir works as a specialist at the Ministry of Education and Children coordinating the MEMM project — an abbreviation for education, welcoming and culture. The project is being developed in close collaboration with the Centre for Language and Literacy in Reykjavík and the newly established national Directorate of Education and School Services. Previously Jónsdóttir was the head of the Center for Innovation at Reykjavík’s Department of Education and Youth and before that served as a coordinator for multicultural education in preschools.  

The MEMM project was created to support inclusive education and the education of multilingual learners, a need that has been growing with substantial increases in immigration since about 2014. Among other things, immigration to Iceland has been driven by economic opportunities, particularly in the tourist industry. With a total population of less than 400,000 and almost 2.3 million visitors in 2024, immigrants fill about 40% of the jobs in the tourist industry, with many of those immigrants coming from Poland, Ukraine, and the Philippines. For earlier coverage of developments in Iceland’s education system see part 1 and part 2 of a conversation with Jón Torfi Jónasson “On the inertia of education systems and hope for the future” and “Relish the freedom you have and find the balance.” 

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Thomas Hatch: Can you tell me about some of the problems that led to the development of the Directorate of Education and School services  and to your efforts to build national support services for inclusive education and multilingual learners? 

Fríða Bjarney Jónsdóttir: In Iceland, we face the problem that we have very, very tiny municipalities that have very minor support services for their schools, and there is no national support system for children with diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Although Reykjavik and some larger cities have developed these support services, the smaller municipalities don’t have this capacity. As a result, the government has changed the law and expanded the responsibilities of the Directorate of Education and School Services.  The MEMM project is part of this expansion and aims to respond to this challenge by learning from municipalities that have developed their school services and building the infrastructure of materials, tools, and services needed to support the education of multilingual and immigrant children across the country. 

I’m here at the Ministry of Education and Children now for two years to coordinate this project. Before this I had participated in developing a team for the Centre for Language and Literacy in the city of Reykjavik that had a similar goal. One of the first things that we did through the MEMM project was to move that team from Reykjavik to this new national Directorate for Education and School Services. That way, the new people we are hiring can build on that earlier work. 

The Directorate of Education and School Services is also developing a new database that will provide schools with a completely new system for tracking children’s progress along with a toolbox for supporting teachers’ development. But it’s important to note that providing these kinds of services for schools is a total shift in the way that the Directorate works. Before this, the Directorate was primarily responsible for standardized testing and for publishing learning material for primary and middle school (for compulsory or “basic” education). Now, the Directorate has been tasked with creating the first database that provides real time information about which children are in each school. The teacher can see it; the headmaster can see it; the municipality can see it. We are collaborating with the team that is designing the database to make sure it includes information about children’s linguistic background. With the new database, we will be able to see, for example, how many children with each kind of linguistic background are in a particular school and how they are progressing. We can use that information to think about how we can improve our services to each school, and so that they can improve their support for each child, particularly if the child is not progressing. That effort is a part of making sure that children with linguistic and cultural background have a place in all the education initiatives that are being planned. We are also developing curriculum materials for teaching Icelandic as a second language. Up to now, it has been the responsibility of the teacher who teaches Icelandic as a second language to find their own materials. 

We’re also working on issues like how do you welcome refugee children, refugee parents, refugee families that don’t understand the Icelandic school system? And what kinds of early interventions, inclusive approaches, and culturally sensitive approaches are needed when working with immigrant children and families? As part of our project, we are developing a framework and collecting good examples of welcoming plans from Reykjavik and municipalities that have been working on these issues for some time. Additionally, we will have videos for parents about the Icelandic preschool and compulsory school system, and we have “cultural mediators” that can invite parents for discussions about what’s the difference between, say, the Polish school system and the Icelandic school system. 

“How do you welcome refugee children, refugee parents, refugee families that don’t understand the Icelandic school system? And what kinds of early interventions, inclusive approaches, and culturally sensitive approaches are needed when working with immigrant children and families?”

TH: Could you say a little bit more about the cultural mediators? 

FBJ: That’s one of the innovative projects we started in Reykjavik thirteen years ago. I had a grant to develop this one position with a Polish speaking mediator for preschools, and now Reykjavik has four of those positions for immigrants who speak Polish, Filipino, Arabic, Spanish, English and Ukrainian. We call these cultural mediators Brúarsmiðir, which means bridge builders, because we’re building bridges from one culture to the other. In our current project, we have hired four more people to serve as cultural mediators, and they are collaborating with the team from Reykjavik. There’s a slightly different role with those working in Reykjavik and those we hired to work in the Directorate, because by law, the municipality has different responsibilities for their schools and families than the state. In the municipalities, you can work with individual families, but when you are coming from the Directorate, you hardly work with individual families. Instead, you help the school and the teachers to become more culturally sensitive.  

TH: And do you have an example or a story of a successful mediator? 

FBJ: There are many stories! For example, it’s a very common misunderstanding that if a child speaks another language at home and the child is not making progress in Icelandic, the teacher assumes that the child is very good in their mother tongue, so the Icelandic doesn’t matter as much. But when you have the cultural mediator sitting down with the teacher and the parent, the cultural mediator realizes that the parent thinks that the child is perfect in Icelandic but is not very good in their home language. The cultural mediator can help the school and the parents to work together developing a shared understanding of the child’s strengths and the possibilities for improvement

When the Ukranian war broke out and also when we had a large group of refugees coming from Palestine, Reykjavík created what we’re calling family and school-based centers  that can provide a “soft welcoming” into the system. The cultural mediators can work there and talk to the parents and help clear up any misunderstandings. It’s not like we can take prejudices away, but when you have someone who can understand both sides, it’s easier to build cultural sensitivity into the system.  

“It’s not like we can take prejudices away, but when you have someone who can understand both sides, it’s easier to build cultural sensitivity into the system.” 

TH: I’ve talked to people in Poland who’ve taken a similar approach to welcome Ukrainian refugees into their system (see Jacek Pyżalski on the Refugee Crisis and the Polish Education System’s Response to the War on Ukraine). Obviously, you can’t cover every language or every background, so how do you handle that? What happens if there’s no cultural mediator that fits your background or your language?

FBJ: We can’t cover all of them, but we try to collect information about as many school systems as possible. The cultural mediators also host webinars and courses for Icelandic teachers to learn about the school system in Poland, the school system in Ukraine, and other places. This can help teachers to understand what to do if there is a parent who is not willing to put their child in afterschool activities for example. Informal education is very, very highly regarded in Iceland, and it’s an important part of the whole system. But some immigrant parents may think afterschool activities are a waste of time because the child is “not learning.” The cultural mediators can sit down and help the teacher explain why it’s important for the students, how it can support their social development, and how it can help build trust among a group of children. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having the mediators in our system, but we cannot put the sole responsibility on their shoulders.  We need cultural sensitivity and inclusive thinking from all our teachers, head teachers, headmasters. We cannot take that responsibility away from the school just because we have a mediator.  

“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of having the mediators in our system, but we cannot put the sole responsibility on their shoulders. We need cultural sensitivity and inclusive thinking from all our teachers, head teachers, headmasters.”

Next week: Fostering collective responsibility for inclusive education: Developing national support for immigrants and multilingual learners in Iceland (Part 2)

All five Nordic countries and Costa Rica occupy the top slots on the latest World Happiness Survey, but life satisfaction of those under 25 in English countries has dropped sharply in the past 10 years. What’s going on? This scan of the headlines from around the world gives a glimpse of the results from the latest World Happiness survey and explores the relationship between children’s social media use and happiness. For other recent stories from IEN about children’s wellbeing see: Could concerns about the academic pressure on students in China lead to real changes in conventional schooling? Stability & change in the education system in China (Part 4), Engagement, Wellbeing, and Innovation in the Wake of the School Closures in Vietnam:  A Conversation with Chi Hieu Nguyen (Part 2); A view from Poland (Part 2) – Jacek Pyżalski discusses the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students, teachers and wellbeing; Thirteen insights into teacher wellbeing and mental health in England; Headlines around the world: PISA (2015) Well-Being Report

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World Happiness Report 2026

Mapped: The Happiest Countries in the World, Visual Capitalist

Ranked: The World’s Richest Countries vs. the Happiest Countries, Visual Capitalist

A Nordic nation is the world’s happiest country for the ninth year in a row, CNN

The 25 Happiest Countries In The World, According To The 2026 World Happiness Report, Forbes

World Happiness Report highlights social media’s negative impact, ranks Finland as happiest country, NBC News

The 2026 rankings mark the second year in a row that none of the English-speaking countries appear in the top 10. The United States is at 23rd place, Canada is at 25th and Britain at 29th.

Social media makes people unhappy — World Happiness Report, Deutsche Welle

What the World Happiness Report reveals about social media and the world’s happiest country, AP

“Heavy social media use contributes to a stark decline in well-being among young people, with the effects particularly worrying in teenage girls in English-speaking countries and Western Europe, according to the World Happiness Report 2026.”

Australia

Australia falls to new low in World Happiness Rankings, 9 News

Canada

Where Canada falls on the 2026 World Happiness Report, CTV News

Canada slipped to 25th place after coming 18th last year, finishing behind the 23rd-ranked United States…In the 2015 report, Canada ranked fifth but has since steadily declined, with 25th place marking its lowest ranking since the report was launched in 2012.

Cyprus

Cyprus falls to 62nd in world happiness ranking as decade-long slide continues, In-Cyprus Phile News

Finland

Finland ranks as “world’s happiest country” for 9th year in a row, YLE

“All five Nordic countries are in the top six, with Iceland and Denmark close behind Finland. In fourth place is Costa Rica, the highest ranking ever for a Latin American country. Sweden and Norway are in fifth and sixth places.”

France

‘Harm at a population level’: World Happiness Report flags social media’s negative impact, France24

Germany

World Happiness Report: Finland tops the list – where does Germany stand? Deutschland

Greece

Greece and Cyprus Slide in 2026 World Happiness Report, Greek Reporter

India

World Happiness Report 2026: Finland and Afghanistan maintain top and bottom positions respectively; India improves ranking, The Times of India

World Happiness Report: Only place Pakistan is ‘smiling,’ India at 116, Herald GOA

The latest World Happiness Report has once again highlighted the stark contrast in happiness levels across South Asia. India, ranking 116th, trails behind its neighbouring country Pakistan, which sits at 104, and even war-affected nations such as Iran (97th). Other neighbours fared differently, with Bangladesh at 127, Sri Lanka at 134, Afghanistan at 147, and Nepal at 134.

Israel

Despite war, Israel ranks 8th in global happiness survey, same as last year, Times of Israel

Luxembourg

Luxembourg ranks ninth among world’s happiest countries, Luxembourg Times

Netherlands

Dutch drop in World Happiness ranking, social media aid decline, Dutch News

New Zealand

Kiwis aged 15-24 lag in world happiness rankings, 1 News

“The report suggested that higher levels of social media usage was linked to lower wellbeing, particularly when use was heavy and more passive, such as browsing or “doom scrolling” rather than active communication.”

Philippines

Philippines inches up to 56th in global happiness index, B World Online

Romania

World Happiness Report 2026: Finland tops ranking for ninth year, Romania climbs one place, Romania Insider

Sri Lanka

World Happiness Report 2026: Sri Lanka ranked among world’s unhappiest countries, Adaderana LK

Turkey

Turkey ranks 94th in world happiness report as Nordic countries top list again, Turkish Minute

United Arab Emirates

UAE first in Arab world and 21st globally in World Happiness Index, Gulf of Today

United Kingdom

Happiest countries 2026: Finland tops list as UK drops six places, BBC