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Article

Neglected Part of Education Sustainability: Social Work Intervention on the Quality of Extracurricular Life of Migrant Workers’ Children

1
School of Marxism, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 211106, China
2
Department of Sociology, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
*
Authors to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sustainability 2022, 14(5), 2486; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052486
Submission received: 21 January 2022 / Revised: 14 February 2022 / Accepted: 19 February 2022 / Published: 22 February 2022
(This article belongs to the Collection Sustainable Citizenship and Education)

Abstract

:
The extracurricular life and education of migrant children are significant to the formation of personality and values, but it has been ignored for a long time. The aim of this study is to obtain evidence supporting the theoretical argument that social work intervention in extracurricular education can have a positive impact on migrant children’s learning ability, social adaptability, personality, and interest shaping. From the perspective of practice, including participatory observation and case study method, this paper analyzes the situation of 71 migrant children in order to improve their extracurricular life quality by social work intervention. In the short term, project members have generally developed good study habits. In the long term, the academic performance is generally excellent, which is beneficial to the development of school teaching tasks. The project has an obvious beneficial impact on the academic learning ability and mental health of migrant workers’ children, especially the ability of social adaptation and the shaping of personality interests. The project helps to strengthen the sustainability of migrant children’s education.

1. Introduction

In China, since the 1990s, a large number of migrant workers have poured into cities and become the main force in urban construction and development. In cities with a large number of rural immigrants, such as Beijing and Shanghai, through the epidemiological survey of COVID-19 published by the government, we can easily distinguish whether a specific individual is a local urban resident or a rural immigrant. Affected by factors such as the household registration system, the social security system, and the needs of enterprises, most migrant workers, compared with the urban population, belong to urban industrial workers, but belong to the disadvantaged group in employment competition. They only engage in work with high labor intensity, long time, few benefits, and lack of labor security. Migrants from rural to urban areas have attracted a great deal of attention in sustainability research [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8].
In 2019, there were roughly 300 million migrant workers in China, accounting for 30% of China’s total workforce [9], and the number of migrant workers’ children is also very large [10]. This paper focuses on children aged between 6 and 12, who are in elementary school compulsory education and migrant with their parents in the city. The policy and social service framework to deal with the challenges of immigrants and their families include: (1) the immigrant schools provided by the Chinese government, but the teachers are weak and the teaching facilities are backward; (2) nonprofit social organizations provide extracurricular services for migrant children by intervening in communities and families [11]. The research of this paper belongs to the second group.
A large number of studies [5,6,7] show that the parents’ employment and welfare benefits determine the quality of migrant workers’ children’s lives. It can be seen that poor living conditions, weak economic foundation, and high-intensity work constitute the migrant workers’ children’s family living environment. In such a family environment, the extracurricular life of migrant workers’ children is similar to that of their parents, which is manifested in the single content of extracurricular life, narrow activity space, lack of peer groups, and lack of necessary guidance and interest cultivation.
In the traditional Chinese education philosophy, school education is the mainstream and important education, while extracurricular life has long been neglected by both teachers and parents. This paper defines extracurricular life as follows: the sum of all time and activities outside the school classroom, the time range includes weekends, holidays, and vacations. Different from regular classroom teaching, extracurricular life is a broad space for children to relieve stress, release their nature, and develop their personalities. Extracurricular life is also the key to children’s healthy development. In fact, school education and extracurricular life together constitute a complete environment for children’s growth. With the implementation of the policy of reducing the burden of compulsory education in China in 1995, Chinese primary school students’ time at school has been reduced to about 190 days a year, while extracurricular time has increased. Extracurricular life should be seen by the public and should be paid attention to [12]. However, different from urban children, the family life of the migrant workers’ children is monotonous, and their extracurricular life is also inadequate. This is mostly related to the fact that their parents are engaged in low-end industrial labor, have little time at home, and do not pay much attention to their extracurricular life. The community also lacks corresponding intervention. In the long run, it is not conducive to the healthy development of migrant workers’ children.
Empowerment theory [13], which was proposed by Barbara Solomon in 1976, is the theoretical background of this paper. Empowerment is the process of social work carrying out a series of activities for the service object, especially assisting socially vulnerable groups, helping them increase their ability, and trying to change their environment. In an established social stratum structure, the ability of social members will affect their flow direction. For migrant children, their parents hope to realize the upward flow from lower social status to higher social status and realize the change of income, reputation, and social status. Only by improving their ability to narrow the gap with the children of local citizens can migrant children achieve upward mobility [14]. The impact of institutional barriers such as immigration on children’s registered residence requires the assistance of society in helping to achieve the upward mobility of immigrant children. These abilities involve learning ability, social adaptability, and self-identification of migrant children. Therefore, enhancing these abilities is the specific content of increasing energy in this service. Besides, Amartya Kumar Sen’s capability improvement theory [15] also emphasizes empowerment. In view of the situation that the children of migrant workers have little access to resources and a single private social network, it is necessary to build an added social support network to help the children of migrant workers obtain resources and channels to improve their ability.
Migrant workers and their children are important objects of social workers’ attention and service. However, the existing research focuses on school education and pays little attention to extracurricular life outside of school education. This paper focuses on the area of extracurricular life that has been neglected for a long time, trying to understand the situation of migrant workers’ children after school, and find out the internal and external causes of the monotonous and boring extracurricular life, so as to intervene and improve in a targeted manner. The aim of this study is to obtain evidence supporting the theoretical argument that social work intervention in extracurricular education can have a positive impact on migrant children’s learning ability, social adaptability, personality, and interest shaping. This paper takes 71 migrant workers’ children from the Chinese Jiangsu Venture Philanthropy Project, the Young Eagle Flying (YEF) Project, as the service and survey subjects, and conducts real and effective community social work interventions. Through short-term and long-term observations, it is shown that the project has achieved beneficial results in the aspects of learning ability and mental health, especially the ability of social adaptation and the shaping of personality interests. The project helps to strengthen the sustainability of migrant workers’ children’s education.
Given sustainability’s polymorphic nature, this paper defines the sustainability of migrant children’s education as school education, family education, and extracurricular education, which affect each other and together constitute the education of immigrant children. The sustainability of migrant children’s education is reflected in the sustainability of school education, family education, and extracurricular education. With the joint efforts of family education and extracurricular education, the interruption of school such as dropping out of school and children committing crime should be avoided. Unfortunately, most of the existing studies on the education of migrant children focus on school education and family education, and extracurricular education has been ignored by researchers for a long time, which has a direct negative impact on the sustainability of migrant children’s education.

2. Related Works

As an accessory to China’s economic development, the migrant workers’ children have distinctive Chinese characteristics. Although other countries do not have the proper nouns for migrant workers’ children, similar groups exist, namely the descendants of immigrants. Immigration refers to the migration of citizens of one country to another country through different channels. Those born in the country of immigration or born in the country following their parents’ immigration are called immigrant offspring [16].
In the US, the number of immigrants has exceeded 43.2 million, accounting for one-fifth of the total number of immigrants in the world. The rapidly growing and changing immigrant groups have brought a profound impact on American society. The United States has successively issued various laws to protect their rights to employment and education [17]. However, the United States has also experienced different forms of xenophobia at different times. For example, the “Immigration Proposal No. 187” passed by the California government in 1994 attempted to deny free public education to descendants of immigrants.
In the United Kingdom, there are also a large number of immigrant descendants. It was not until the 1980s that they began to consider the particularities of minority education, carried out targeted language teaching, added minority history and culture to the teaching curriculum, and implemented teaching that can fully develop children’s potential [18].
In India, the situation of the descendants of immigrants is less optimistic. Das [19] and Roy’s [20] surveys in many states in India show that although the educational status of the descendants of immigrants has been improved after the migration, the high cost of living in the cities where they have migrated prevents them from high-quality school teaching facilities.
In China, since the reform and opening-up trend of migrant workers, there have been more and more studies on the education of migrant workers’ children [21,22,23,24,25,26,27], but they only focus on school education, and lack of attention to their extracurricular life. Xie Jianshe [28] survey data in the urban areas of the Pearl River Delta in China show that more than 70% of migrant workers’ children attend private schools. In view of the increasingly prominent educational problems of the migrant workers’ children, such as the old age of entering school, the high rate of dropout in transfer, the poor performance, and the low enrollment rate, the author proposes that we should construct an educational mechanism that matches the inflow and outflow places of the migrant workers’ children. Zheng Anqi [29] believes that school-age children in the nine-year compulsory education stage need a lot of after-school education. The perfection of after-school education is related to the employment orientation after adulthood, and more importantly, whether they can form a sound personality. Compared with urban children, migrant workers’ children especially need a rich extracurricular life to help them adapt to urban life. However, unfortunately, their current situation is insufficient social attention, insufficient school resources, and limited financial ability of parents.

3. Methods and Procedures

3.1. Research Methods

This paper adopts qualitative research methods. With full consideration of the background of the social work intervention and service in the YEF project, we have set the goal of social work intervention and based on this, we have formulated the theme of each service activity. Further, we make appropriate and timely adjustments to the activities according to the feedback and suggestions of immigrant children and their parents. The evaluation of the social work intervention’s achievement of the goal of improving the ability of migrant workers’ children is introduced in detail, under the guidance of the empowerment theory.
Mainly, this study adopts a case study method and demonstrates the application of the theory in the project, the implementation process, and the results of the project through the description of the process result. That is, through the analysis of the case, from the perspectives of the students and their parents, the detailed content and operation of the project were obtained. In this process, the author participated in the home visit activities and established a good communication relationship with the parents of the students. The communication of parents shows the implementation effect of the project from the perspective of parents. At the same time, it combines the case of volunteers and social workers to explain the project from the initial plan design to the specific implementation, as well as the theoretical implementation and team building during the project implementation. The method of dissecting these cases is used to achieve the purpose of conducting specific research on the effects of this service.
For data collection, the questionnaires, participatory observation, and interviews are used as follows.
  • Three questionnaires were designed, which were used respectively: (1) before immigrant children participated in the activity; (2) when the children of immigrants have participated in the activity for three months; (3) the fifth year of immigrant children’s participation in the activity. All questionnaires were filled out by the parents of immigrant children (or teachers, if the parents are illiterate or unable to be contacted) because the immigrant children are possibly too young to answer these questions accurately. Since the questionnaire is the basis of the interview, the questionnaire is not anonymous. For privacy reasons, this paper only discloses the statistical results after sorting out the questionnaire.
  • Participatory observation and interview can help researchers pay attention to the behavior of participants in all aspects, and collect the necessary information through internal observations that are activities carried out with the observation objects. One of the authors was approved as a volunteer to participate in three months of social intervention, including homework guidance and outdoor activities. Therefore, we were access granted to observe and interview immigrant children, parents, and teachers. Fortunately, as supplement to the questionnaire, interviews with migrant children play an important role to reduce the deviation between the feelings of migrant children and the evaluation of parents and teachers.

3.2. Research Procedures

First of all, establish communication with the “stakeholders” of the project and reach a consensus on the research purpose. The “stakeholders” of the project include the applicant and scheme designer, the executive responsible party, volunteers and social workers, migrant workers’ children, and their parents. Communicate with “stakeholders” to understand the ideas of the designer and executor of the project, and preliminarily show the author’s assumption, requirements, and purpose of the project research. With the understanding and support of many parties, establish a cooperative relationship with the project executor. On the basis of establishing a cooperative relationship, the research plan is determined. The specific steps of the scheme include: first, to obtain the trust of the service cooperation team and service objects; second, field research, including the research of project objectives, support theory, project implementation process, and final effect. Through the above steps, we can have a basic understanding of the main links and concepts of the project and in the process of research, the responsible party and the executive party of the project can become the data providers of this study, thus constituting all the samples and dimensions of this study.

4. Intervention of Social Workers

From a practical perspective, this paper conducts research on the involvement of migrant workers’ children’s extracurricular life in the Jiangsu Province Venture Philanthropy Project, the “YEF project”. The purpose of the research is to understand the current situation and expectations of their extracurricular life and try to improve the quality of their extracurricular life, and ultimately help them form a perfect personality and better adapt to and integrate into city life. In the third month and the fifth year of the project, in-depth interviews were conducted with the parents of project members, focusing on analyzing whether the children’s extracurricular life has changed or improved in the eyes of the parents, and then making corresponding responses to the short-term and long-term goals of the project evaluation and research.

4.1. The Actual Situation and Causes of the Children’s Extracurricular Life

The target of this paper is mainly 71 voluntarily enrolled primary school students from Nanjing H Migrant Children Primary School, aged from 7 to 9. Their parents are all migrant workers, and their occupations mainly involve irregular snack cooks, excavator operators, construction workers, postmen, and security guards. Through the preliminary interviews, we have an overall grasp of the basic situation of the project members and the current status of their extracurricular life: they live in a community that lacks peer playmates, and their community lacks supporting facilities to meet their extracurricular needs, and their extracurricular life is extremely monotonous and boring.
  • Poor self-control. Younger age and lack of parental supervision are the main reasons, which directly cause them to delay homework and difficulty developing correct learning habits.
  • No interest in learning. Most of the students’ attitude towards learning is to complete the task, and once the homework is finished, they will not do anything related to learning, including reading books.
Through interviews with the migrant workers’ children themselves, their parents, and teachers, this paper summarizes the causes of their after-school living conditions as follows:
  • The life of migrant workers in spare time is monotonous. This paper conducted a questionnaire survey on 71 parents of migrant workers’ children and made statistics on the spare-time life of migrant workers. The results are shown in Table 1. Basic and low-cost recreational activities have become the main items for migrant workers. For them, it seemed impossible to engage in high-cost puzzle leisure activities. In the case of long working hours, high labor intensity, and more night shifts, they could not have time to take care of other things.
  • Migrant workers and their children have an insufficient understanding of the meaning of extracurricular life. The results of the questionnaire survey of 71 migrant workers’ children in this paper are shown in Table 2. Similar to their parents, basic activities and low-cost recreational activities occupy the main time of migrant workers’ children, and only one child participated in free table tennis activities in the community on weekends occasionally. Limited by their culture and living standards, migrant workers lack a correct understanding of the meaning of spiritual and cultural life, and the extracurricular life of the migrant workers’ children is limited to learning and playing.
  • Migrant workers and their children have two extremes in their extracurricular life expectations. The first expectation is that extracurricular life is only a supplement and enhancement of classroom education and improving academic performance is the overall goal. Such migrant workers place their hopes of getting rid of their migrant status on their children, hoping to obtain high-quality educational resources in the city, so as to become talents and gain a foothold in the city. So, it is not difficult to understand why parents pay attention to their children’s extracurricular life in terms of homework and grades. The second expectation is that life after school is not important and one does not need to study after school. Such migrant workers themselves did not receive a good education, have deviations in their understanding of the importance of education, and have no time to take care of their children. This kind of parent basically focuses on recreational activities in their free time, and they take it for granted that their children focus on recreational activities in their free time.

4.2. The Children’s Actual Expectation of Extracurricular Life

Through face-to-face interviews with 71 project members one by one, this paper has an in-depth understanding of what they really want to do when they return home from school and long vacations, understand the needs of the service targets, and provide better services. This is exactly the “people-oriented” of social work services.
  • The need for homework guidance. Completing homework is the minimum requirement for primary school students. Judging from the responses of interviewed project members, most of them cannot complete homework in time, and their family members do not have the ability to tutor homework. It can be seen that providing corresponding schoolwork guidance for migrant workers’ children is the most basic requirement to improve their learning ability.
  • The need for social communication. The project members described life after school as monotonous and boring. Parents who are busy with their livelihoods cannot meet their children’s need for company. In this case, the need for partner groups is even stronger. However, in terms of the community environment in which project members live, there are few partner groups, and there is no opportunity to contact small partners in other places. This requires the intervention of external forces to build a platform for the migrant workers’ children to meet new partners, such as team games and other various activities.
  • The needs of hobby cultivation. Due to the lack of healthy guidance for project members, their free time is flooded with television, mobile phones, and electronic games, which will have a negative impact on the learning and personality of project members in the long term. Helping project members find their points of interest and actively guiding them through social practice courses can help them shape a positive personality and a healthy lifestyle. It will also benefit the growth and development of project members in the long run.

4.3. The Main Contents of Social Work Intervention

In the face of the huge gap between the living conditions and expectations of the children who moved with them after school, combined with the special personality characteristics of the project members in the lower grades of elementary school, the community growth environment, and other factors, this paper formulated a weekly activity plan lasting for 5 years, which aims to help members re-understand and define extracurricular life through group activities.
  • Develop good learning habits and interests. In the design of the project, academic guidance is given priority and the way of guidance varies from grade to grade. For the lower grades, we should focus on the cultivation of learning habits to help them form good learning habits, such as a preview of new knowledge, review of homework, and so on. For senior grades, the guidance for them is around answering questions. Each volunteer is responsible for a project member to carry out targeted guidance. Among them, it includes the cultivation of learning habits, especially focusing on mining the interests of project members through the learning of different modules. Good learning habits are the basis of improving learning ability. Therefore, this project focuses on the guidance of cultivating good learning habits to guide the project members.
  • Help members enjoy social resources. This project aims to improve the learning and living abilities of migrant workers’ children and narrow the gap with urban children. The amount of participation in social activities is an important manifestation of the gap. Therefore, the YEF project builds a platform for the children to participate in social activities and makes full use of community resources to carry out a wealth of after-school activities for the migrant workers’ children to integrate into urban society.
  • Cultivate their wide range of interests and specialties. In social practice activities, the project members can participate in situational learning by extending the traditional classroom. In addition, the project also actively communicates with parents to urge them to carry out interest-oriented extracurricular life in addition to the weekly activity time.

4.4. Working Methods of Social Work Intervention

The following are the specific methods used to achieve the goals of the project:
  • Cultivating discipline awareness by group work methods. Good discipline is the prerequisite and basis for cultivating students’ good study habits, especially for children in the compulsory education stage. Discipline is directly related to the level of learning ability. Through observation, we found that compared with children of citizens, migrant workers’ children are more likely to be self-centered and not obey the instructions of the instructor. Therefore, we put the cultivation of discipline awareness in an important position. First of all, help students find a sense of belonging quickly through grouping. After the sense of belonging is established, the group members’ compliance with discipline is listed as a factor in the competition between groups during the activity, and the group and each group member are urged to supervise each other. In this way, the participation of students in the group means that they must abide by discipline. At the same time, we promptly praise and reward the outstanding group to strengthen the discipline awareness of the students.
  • Assist the improvement of ability through individualized education. Through the platform of the YEF project, help the children of migrants to establish a peer group and build a social network of peer groups to help build their social communication skills. In the process of building social communication ability, individualized education methods must be adopted from person to person. Generally, the students who have just entered the program are mostly taciturn, and they all show that they are unwilling to actively interact with others. This is related to their small life circle and single activity. Therefore, in this project, various small games and team building activities throughout the project, including social practice activities, are used to break this silence, allowing children to speak in a relaxed and pleasant environment and actively communicate with others.
  • Encouragement is fairly important. Many of them are reluctant to speak not only because they do not know what to say, but also because they are afraid of saying something wrong. This inferiority complex needs to be encouraged especially to help students recognize their own strengths or characteristics and overcome this inferiority complex, but the way of encouragement varies from person to person.
The above construction of the students’ abilities is the concrete manifestation of the general goal, and the guiding methods for these specific goals all contain the methods and theories of social work and the methods of children’s pedagogy. These methods and theories are in line with the “YEF project”. The goal and philosophy are exactly the same, it is a guarantee that the project can operate and the goal can be achieved.

5. Results

5.1. The Short-Term Effect of Social Work Intervention

Three months after the project was launched, the staff conducted an assessment of the short-term effects of the project, mainly using parent interviews and group observations. The results of the short-term effect of social work intervention are shown in Table 3.
Through two parent interviews before and three months after the event, the changes in project members were examined from the perspective of parents. Initially, the most common idea among 71 parents was that someone would take care of their children. With the development of the activities, they gradually realized that far beyond the level of care, individual parents began to reflect on their children’s performance in the activities, and consciously participated in their children’s extracurricular life. More than half of the parents found that their children met more friends of the same age and their personalities became more cheerful.
In addition, we also interviewed migrant children. Due to space constraints, a small part of verbatim answers, which are representative, are shown in Table 4, and the names of migrant children are hidden.
From the observation of the group throughout the activity, it can be seen that the project members have been enthusiastic for the past three months and have participated in every activity seriously. After the activity, they are willing to share and communicate. The feedback from the project members shows that they fully recognize the activities and indeed benefit a lot from the project.
In summary, the short-term effects of this project have exceeded expectations. Project members have generally developed good study habits. The cultivation of these habits can help improve their learning ability; they cultivate one or two hobbies and make new friends based on this. It expanded the circle of interpersonal communication; it is worth mentioning that they learned how to communicate with others, especially their parents, thereby improving the parent–child relationship in the family. This is similar to the conclusions of other researchers [24,30].

5.2. The Long-Term Effect of Social Work Intervention

This project started in 2013 and has lasted for more than 7 years when this paper was completed, providing a basis for the evaluation of medium- and long-term effects. Unfortunately, almost half of the 71 members who participated in the project in the first year have left due to various reasons such as withdrawal from the project, migration to another city, dropping out from school, and death. Five years later, only thirty-nine project members are left, and they have also grown to upper elementary or junior high school students. As shown in Table 5, through interviews with the remaining project members, their parents, and teachers, as well as comparisons with other students of the same age who belong to the H Migrant Children Primary School but not participating in the project, and students of the same age from other migrant workers’ children’s primary schools in the community, this project has the following advantages long-term effects:
  • The academic performance is generally excellent, which is beneficial to the development of school teaching tasks. Judging from the actual academic performance reported by the school, the project members’ academic performance rankings in the H Migrant Children’s Primary School are all ranked high, which has a lot to do with their long-term extracurricular tutoring. Most of the volunteers participating in the project are college students, whose academic guidance ability is higher than that of the teachers in the H primary school. In addition, it is precisely because of the emergence of a large number of models of good character and learning among the members of this project, which complements the study and life outside of traditional education, and is beneficial to the development of school teaching tasks, that the overall learning style of the H Migrant Children Primary School has been significantly improved.
  • The ability to adapt to society is significantly enhanced, and a community cultural environment suitable for children’s development is created. Through resource sharing, the existing environment in the community of migrant workers’ children has been improved, and a community cultural environment suitable for children’s development has been created. Unexpectedly, the project also indirectly reduced the rate of juvenile crime. The 71 members participating in the project had only 2 violations of discipline, while H Migrant Children Primary School disciplined students for nearly 100 violations of law and discipline in the past 5 years. In a sense, the development of this project has enabled these migrant workers’ children to engage in positive activities in their extracurricular life, avoiding the misguided path of being restocked.
  • Shape a healthy personality and cultivate a wide range of interests and expertise. With five years of project experience, the members of this project have significantly increased their participation in high-cost educational leisure activities. They are participating in sports and competitions, movie performances, museums, science and technology museums, libraries, and outing playgrounds with urban children. The proportion of reading books and newspapers was close, while the comparison group still focused on low-cost recreational activities such as watching TV, playing mobile phones, and electronic games. At the family level, this project helps migrant workers to have a more comprehensive and full understanding of their children’s life and learning conditions, helps them take better care of their children’s daily life and studies, and provides a better family life.

6. Discussion

The core of empowerment theory is to help people with low ability due to poverty improve their ability and change their situation. The social work service of this paper is to establish a platform to provide migrant children with resources for extracurricular life and education, including academic counseling and interest cultivation. After receiving these services, migrant children have formed good learning habits, established new peer groups, and learned how to communicate with different people. Obviously, the environmental changes of migrant children have had a significant positive impact on improving their learning ability. On the other hand, the granting of their right to use urban public infrastructure is also conducive to the adaptation and integration of migrant children into the city and the establishment of self-identity. In the empowerment theory, it is also believed that the empowerment of people should be realized around the following dimensions: (1) help the service object build the ability to learn knowledge; (2) assist the service object to obtain the right to use resources; (3) help the service object obtain the development of a positive sense of self. The service content of social work intervention in this paper is completely consistent with the above three dimensions of empowerment theory, so we believed that both social work intervention content and the effect of this paper can fully reflect the implementation of empowerment theory.
Extracurricular life is an important supplement to school education. A rich extracurricular life plays a key role in children’s physical and mental development, values and personality. Based on the effectiveness and deficiencies of the YEF project, this paper proposes the following suggestions for improving the extracurricular life of the migrant workers’ children.
The government should increase funding in the field of culture, science, and education. Limited by activity funds, this social work intervention activity is difficult to carry out more diverse activities. On the one hand, because most of the migrant workers’ children live around the urban–rural fringe or remote construction sites, it is inconvenient to travel. On the other hand, carrying out various activities requires more manpower and material support, which is difficult to achieve in reality [4,5,27]. In this regard, the state should increase funding in the field of culture, science, and education, and build free educational venues, such as science and technology museums, museums, and libraries. This would encourage migrant workers’ children to go out of campus and home, participate in educational and lively and interesting activities, and feel the charm of culture and technology. In this way, migrant workers’ children can not only broaden their horizons but also increase the motivation for upward and hard work in the future.
The community [22,24] should fully develop activity resources. The extracurricular life of the migrant workers’ children is an important part of the growth environment. It is not only the responsibility of the school and family but also the responsibility of the community to make the arrangements for the extracurricular life of the migrant workers’ children reasonable. The ones that are closely related to children and have the greatest impact are those close to the community venues and facilities. Based on the objective problem of the high mobility of migrant workers, the community where they are located should conduct personnel registration investigations and data updates in a timely manner. Secondly, the community can make full use of real-time updated family information, regularly enter the home, and understand and care about possible problems in the study and life of the migrant workers’ children. Community transformation is fairly needed, which may provide migrant children with playgrounds for sports, and makes full use of the volunteer or organizations to carry out outdoor activities of different themes. After that, the community can be thought of as a multifunctional community integrating education, entertainment, and social interaction.
Migrant workers create a healthy family atmosphere for their children. Restricted by their economic and cultural conditions, the family education received by the migrant workers’ children is simple and rude and lacks scientific guidance for their children’s extracurricular life. Therefore, enriching the extracurricular life of the migrant workers’ children is inseparable from the cooperation of the parents. First of all, parents should always communicate with their teachers, keep abreast of their children’s performance in school, observe their children’s hobbies, and conduct conscious education and training. Secondly, they should encourage children to go out of the family, get in touch with groups of the same age, participate in social activities, and achieve a combination of extracurricular life and social activities. At the same time, it is also recommended that parents carry out appropriate parent–child activities in their spare time instead of watching TV only. This will not only establish a good parent–child relationship [12,26] but also set an example to create a good family atmosphere for their children.
The life and study of the children of rural migrants outside school directly determine the adaptability of rural migrants in cities. At the same time, it also indirectly determines the sustainability of children’s individual education. Firstly, from the long-term effect of social work intervention, the difference between these children’s life trajectory and local urban children is significantly reduced. Compared with the fact that rural migrant children were generally unable to receive higher education in China [30], rural migrant children have almost equal higher education opportunities with urban children, and the sustainability of individual education has been significantly strengthened. Second, the city is also more humanized to rural migrants and strengthens the sustainability of cities in accepting rural migrants. Rural migrants can feel that the city has accepted their children, which will also increase the motivation of rural migrants to the city. The social work intervention in this paper can be used as a model to promote in other cities. Third, the children of rural migrants have the possibility to flow to the upper class [21]. In the future, the third generation of rural migrants can permanently get rid of the label of rural migrant children, which blurs the boundary between the urban and the rural, promotes the sustainability of social stratification and mobility, and is conducive to the normal operation of society, which is similar to other researchers’ work [4,6].

7. Conclusions

According to the interviews with project members, their parents, and teachers, it can be seen that in the short term, the goals of helping project members to develop good study habits, make new friends, and learn how to communicate with others were achieved; in the long term, adaptability and personality and interest shaping have obvious beneficial effects. Therefore, the social work intervention in this paper is effective. It can provide a wealth of activity programs for the children of migrant workers, establish a companion group that can meet the needs of children’s socialization, improve children’s social communication skills, and connect them in many ways. The resources of the migrants have become powerful support for improving the extracurricular life of the migrant workers’ children. To a certain extent, it has shared the pressure of educating children by parents of migrant workers’ children and has become an effective supplement to school education. In short, intervention in the extracurricular life of migrant workers’ children cannot be separated from the cooperation of government, community, and family.
The present study has some important limitations:
  • We have not realized whether the medium- and long-term effect of social work intervention is related to the stability of migrant workers in cities. As mentioned earlier, only 54% of the project members have continuously participated in this project for 7 years, while the performance of other members is unknown. Therefore, obtaining sufficient evidence to study the relationship between immigration stability and the effectiveness of social work intervention is an important task of future investigation and research.
  • The rationality of the activity design of social work intervention in this paper needs to be improved. There are few social practice courses, and almost all of them are concentrated indoors. Therefore, outdoor activities should be increased when social workers intervene in the future.
  • We cannot rule out that the flow of volunteers will have a negative impact on the medium- and long-term effects of social work intervention. Therefore, the personnel flow should be avoided as much as possible in the future, and the training, management, and professional supervision of volunteers should be strengthened.
There are three main novelties in this research:
  • This paper fills the gap of migrant children outside school education and family education. Because of the fact that migrant children generally study in migrant children’s schools with weak teachers and backward teaching facilities, and most of the parents of migrant children are engaged in work with high labor intensity and long working hours, migrant children’s extracurricular life may not be taken into account. The research on extracurricular activities in this paper is ignored by other researchers, but it is fairly important, which can effectively supplement the deficiencies of school education and family education, and narrow the gap between immigrant children and local children.
  • This paper gives full play to the advantages of social work. As a practical work to help vulnerable groups and solve social problems, social work focuses on migrant children. The extracurricular life and education of migrant children is insufficient or even missing, which is not conducive to the improvement of the ability of migrant children. This paper attempts to narrow the gap between migrant children and local children due to a lack of extracurricular life and education through professional intervention. The intervention work includes providing resources for extracurricular life and education of migrant children and helping and promoting the growth and development of migrant children in all aspects.
  • This paper is a long-term research project of more than 7 years. All teenagers have the right to develop and enhance their abilities, and migrant children are no exception. Unfortunately, most of the relevant literature is short-term research, and the goal is to meet the short-term needs of this group. This paper focuses on the long-term service for migrant children for the first time and analyzes in detail the achievement effect of the goal of improving the ability of migrant children. Compared with the short-term effect, the effect of long-term social work intervention is more helpful to migrant children.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, H.Q. and F.M.; methodology, H.Q. and F.M.; investigation, H.Q.; data curation, H.Q. and L.L.; writing—original draft preparation, H.Q.; writing—review and editing, F.M. and L.L.; project administration, H.Q.; funding acquisition, H.Q. and L.L. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Funding

This research was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, grant number 15BZX087, and the Ideological and Political Work Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research in Jiangsu Universities in China, grant number 2020sjb0359.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Not applicable for studies not involving humans or animals.

Informed Consent Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicible.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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Table 1. Statistics on main items of the leisure life of migrant workers.
Table 1. Statistics on main items of the leisure life of migrant workers.
ItemsPercentage (%)
Basic activitiesSleep5.633.8
Do housework28.2
Low-cost recreational activitiesWatch TV16.966.2
Chess and mah-jong5.6
Mobile phone35.2
Square dance8.5
High-cost educational and leisure activitiesSports00
Film0
Museum and library0
Travel0
Reading books0
Table 2. Statistics of main items of children’s extracurricular life.
Table 2. Statistics of main items of children’s extracurricular life.
ItemsPercentage (%)
Basic activitiesSleep12.721.1
Do housework8.4
Low-cost recreational activitiesWatch TV21.177.5
Video games31.0
Mobile phone8.5
Outdoor games16.9
High-cost educational and leisure activitiesSports1.41.4
Film0
Museum and library0
Travel0
Reading books0
Table 3. Short-term effects of social work intervention.
Table 3. Short-term effects of social work intervention.
ItemsBefore Intervention (%)3 Months Later (%)
Family relationsWilling to communicate with parents18.366.2
Parental activity participation rate4.276.1
Education and studiesWilling to take the initiative to learn5.653.5
Excellent rate of academic achievement1.412.7
Character shapingWilling to cultivate new hobbies2.890.1
Willing to make new friends32.459.2
Table 4. Part of verbatim answers to the interview.
Table 4. Part of verbatim answers to the interview.
Question from ResearcherRepresentative Responses from the Participants
Do you like to participate in these activities? Can you finish your homework by yourself after participating in these activities?XY-1: Yes! I will take all the questions I don’t know to the teacher and be praised by the teacher every time. Now I do my homework by myself, and the teacher will check it for me.
XY-2: I don’t like it very much. Many teachers don’t allow it. Maybe.
XY-3: I like it very much. The teachers are very kind to me. I can finish my homework by myself. I’m still teaching other children here!
XY-4: I don’t know. When no one came home, my mother let me come. I did my homework by myself.
XY-5: Yes. I do my homework by myself every day. I used to have a lot of questions that I couldn’t. Now I can ask the teachers here. Let me show you. I got a lot of excellent in my homework book and got a lot of stickers.
Did you join this activity and make good friends? Do you still play together in private? What do you usually play?XY-6: Yes, I joined with my classmates. Now we also know two other girls. Now we play together. We often drop in and do our homework together.
XY-7: I met many friends here. We often play nearby and play gyroscopes.
XY-8: Well, Xiaoqian is my good friend. She and I are in a primary school. She is in class 3 and I am in class 1. We didn’t know each other before. Now we go home together after school, do our homework together, and watch Balala little magic fairy together.
XY-9: Yes, we play marbles outside as long as class is over. You see, this is what I won. I play best.
XY-10: Yes, there are. We used to be in the same class, but his family moved. We get together every weekend to play flying cards and play football at school.
Do you go home every day and talk to your parents about the activities you participate in? Why?XY-11: sometimes, because my mother asks me every day when she takes me home and this is what the teacher asked.
XY-12: I say it every day when I go back. I think it’s fun. My mother also likes to listen to it.
XY-13: I seldom say. My parents come home late. There is only grandma at home. She can’t understand it. I don’t like the homework that records the communication between my parents.
XY-14: Yes, I can say anything, that is, the teacher won’t say anything about my criticism. My father will always ask and annoy my father.
XY-15: Sometimes when I go back, I say, sometimes I don’t. When I go back late, I don’t say. My mother is very busy.
Table 5. Long-term effect of social work intervention.
Table 5. Long-term effect of social work intervention.
ItemsParticipator (%)Other (%)
Ability to adapt to societyCrime rate5.148.7
Community service participation rate89.715.4
Education and studiesDropout rate7.774.4
Excellent rate of academic achievement56.40.0
Character shapingHigh-cost educational and leisure activities71.82.6
Harmonious relationship with parents69.223.1
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Qiang, H.; Liu, L.; Ma, F. Neglected Part of Education Sustainability: Social Work Intervention on the Quality of Extracurricular Life of Migrant Workers’ Children. Sustainability 2022, 14, 2486. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052486

AMA Style

Qiang H, Liu L, Ma F. Neglected Part of Education Sustainability: Social Work Intervention on the Quality of Extracurricular Life of Migrant Workers’ Children. Sustainability. 2022; 14(5):2486. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052486

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Qiang, Huiyuan, Lin Liu, and Fengzhi Ma. 2022. "Neglected Part of Education Sustainability: Social Work Intervention on the Quality of Extracurricular Life of Migrant Workers’ Children" Sustainability 14, no. 5: 2486. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14052486

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