Education is one of the key areas for migrants’ integration, and it is, arguably, one of the main focus of migrants’ integration policies. However, as a central dimension of migration policy, education has been addressed primarily from the perspective of children, targeting, in particular, the educational attainment and success of migrant children, or children with a migrant background. The education of adult migrants, and particularly of those with low literacy, or low levels of schooling, has received less attention. The concept of literacy is used to invoke different types of knowledge, such as absolute and functional literacy, alphabet recognition or, in its broader acceptance, language proficiency. The migration experience often activates one or more types of illiteracy, but the absolute illiteracy of migrants is somewhat and invisible phenomenon in academia, in statistics and in public policy. It is known, though, that there has been an increase of the inflows of migrants from countries with high levels of illiteracy or low levels of schooling in Europe, largely as a consequence of the several ‘migration crisis’, which are disrupting the educational paths of a significant number of individuals forced to flee from war, political persecution or poverty. These new fluxes add up to previous ones that already included unschooled and low educated migrants from a diversity of countries. In this presentation, we aim to discuss the relative position of absolute illiteracy in the general debate of ‘education and migration’, through the content analysis of reference EU policy documents in the fields of education and migration. Special attention will be given to gender, as a structuring dimension of illiteracy, since women represent the large majority of the world’s illiterate population and constitute half of today’s Europe’s international migration. Results show good developments in the integration of a gender perspective in migration and adult learning policies, and at the same time, the consideration of the low skilled and of the migrant population in gender equality policy. However, the confluence of gender, migration and illiteracy, have not yet been comprehensively addressed in European social policy. We argue that the illiteracy of migrants, and particularly of migrant women, configures concrete challenges for social integration and remains as an invisible phenomenon in European social policy, despite the existence of EU funded literacy programs in place in several Member-States. Therefore, absolute illiteracy remains “one step behind” the ‘education and migration’ political debate.

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