Complementary schools in the United Kingdom (UK) are community organised schools with the general aim of teaching
younger generations their ‘native’ languages and cultures. However, the aims and practices of these schools are pre-
dominantly dependent on changes in the social and political contexts both in the host country (in this case the UK) as well
as in the respective ‘home’ countries of these children. This study focuses on one such Turkish complementary school in
London, aiming to describe and analyse the functions of these schools more broadly, by means of a variety of perspectives
and using a social constructivist approach. Data collected from official documents, participant observations, as well as
interviews with parents, teachers, students and organisers of the schools, were analysed, focusing on the emerging themes
in relation to the functions and practices of the schools. The analysis revealed that the official discourses, which stress the
issue of underachievement amongst young people from Turkish speaking backgrounds in the UK, differ strikingly from the
participants’ perceptions of the functions of the school, as well as the actual teaching and learning practices found there. This
discrepancy is attributed to trends in current neo-liberal educational discourses and the discourses surrounding ethnically-
oriented educational provisions in the UK.

doi: 10.15700/201409161043