What is 'fair' and 'just' in refugee education? How teachers and school leaders negotiate competing discourses of 'equity' and 'equality' in Australia

With increasing numbers of students from refugee backgrounds, many Australian schools are struggling to minimise the educational disparity between refugee students and their same age peers. Faced with diverse needs and limited resources, educators must decide whether to distribute targeted resources equally, ensuring all students are given equality of opportunity, or allocate resources to those who need it most, attaining equity of outcome. In this paper, we use data from seven Australian secondary schools identified as examples of 'good practice' to explore how educators navigate notions of 'fairness' to support students from refugee backgrounds. Findings suggest educators struggled to navigate the tension between providing an equal or equitable response, and often these struggles were inextricably tied to student and funding contexts. In under-resourced settings, teachers weighed up seemingly competing forms of disadvantage, frequently opting to distribute resources in a way which favoured equality of opportunity. Contrastingly, in schools with less disadvantage and higher levels of funding, resources were redistributed based on need, striving for more equitable outcomes for refugee students. The findings demonstrate the complex negotiations that educators undertake when allocating resources and consider how these processes align with, or in some cases contradict, notions of fairness and social justice.