Conference Program

In this paper we analyse the institutional stratification and hierarchy of schools across United Kingdom and suggest there are seven socially distinct clusters of schools. Whilst school segregation has received substantial attention, the clustering of schools by class, ethnicity, gender and parental education, has not been explored. Unlike previous analyses of school populations in the UK that tend to rely on Free School Meals as a proxy for social class, we use higher education data to enable parental social class data to be incorporated. We create aggregate pseudo-school populations from students at university who would have been in their final year of school or college between 2014-15 and 2017-18. A Principal Components Analysis was performed, followed by a Hierarchical Clustering on the Principal Components to allow us to analyse the field of schooling and suggest a classification of schools across the UK by parental class background and higher education experience, ethnicity and gender. This allows an analysis that suggests more complex hierarchies that move beyond historical binary perspectives on schooling as selective/comprehensive, private/state, working/middle class. Instead, we find a more complex, geographically varied and socially and ethnically distinctive multi-partite system of schooling across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The seven clusters analysed here are as follows:

1. The major private elite schools of the upper and middle class
2. The female private elite girls’ schools of the upper and middle class
3. The semi-rural state schools of the white middle class
4. The international private schools of the foreign mobile middle classes.
5. The white working-class schools in (post-)industrial towns
6. The ethnically diverse state schools of the lower middle and working class
7. The super-diverse state schools of the urban working class

Our findings allow an exploration of the geography of the segregation and hierarchical of individual schools across multiple scales, from the city to the region and the nation(s). Schools in clusters six and seven are overwhelmingly located in London and certain other large cities, though some provincial cities have very few of these schools. There are distinct regional and local patterns to these clusterings which allow us to examine these relational institutional hierarchies across inter-woven geographical scales. We can also intersect this with forms of marketisation to map the hierarchy of academy school trusts in England.

The consequences of urban transformation on economic inequality, social cohesion or consumption patterns of different social groups is an area of growing academic and political interest. There are controversial debates about the positive or negative effects of gentrification from the point of view of social opportunities, urban development and social cohesion (Slater, 2000; Butler and Robson 2003). The educational field is an area of special interest in which to observe possible effects of gentrification on educational opportunities and inequalities and for which there is still little evidence. How do gentrification processes affect the configuration of school supply in different neighbourhoods? What type of schools are chosen by high SES in gentrified neighbourhoods? Is there a high level of white flight in these contexts or, on the contrary, does the middle or upper-middle class population opt for neighbourhood schools? What effects can be observed on school segregation? These are some of the key questions that must be answered to better understand the effects of gentrification on educational opportunities.

This paper will present an overview of the main effects of neighbourhood gentrification on education inequalities. The findings are based on a systematic literature review of quantitative and qualitative empirical studies assessing different dimensions of education inequalities. We present the main evidence on aspects such as changes in the configuration of education markets, demand patterns and family strategies, school segregation, educational performance and school responses and leadership challenges.

A renaissance of studies on school segregation is occurring in Europe due to rising immigration to the European Union and increasing social inequality within cities and neighbourhoods (Bonal & Belleï, 2018). However, despite an increasing number of publications on the topic in Southern Europe, there are still few analyses on segregation conducted within the Italian context (Pacchi & Ranci, 2017; Santangelo et al., 2018). Furthermore, several studies prove empirical arguments about the negative effects of school segregation on school performance (Karsten et al., 2006; Fekjaer & Birkelund, 2007; Hanushek et al., 2009). Nevertheless, a solid strand of research oriented to investigating the relationship between school dropout and school segregation seems not to have been developed yet. Within this framework, the paper intends to contribute on an empirical and methodological level to this debate.

With a focus on the municipal area of Bologna, the paper explores the presence and extent of school segregation in public primary schools and examines its correlation with the phenomenon of school dropout. Using different segregation indexes (Duncan & Duncan, 1955; Reardon & Owens, 2014) and geo-referenced analysis tools, data provided by the municipal administration for the school year 2021-2022 are employed to investigate the degree of socio-economic and ethnic segregation in primary public schools in Bologna. According to the literature, in many European countries, the high concentration of low-income and immigrant-origin students occurs in the absence of residential segregation as a result of the school choices of native and wealthy families (Burgess et al., 2005; Rangvid, 2007; Cavicchia & Cucca, 2020). Starting from this evidence, the paper intends to test two hypotheses: 1) in a context of moderate residential segregation where school catchment basins are not binding, families' school choices play a central role in determining the phenomenon of school segregation; 2) low-income students and immigrant-origin students are more likely to attend the nearest school to their home and adhere to suggested school catchment areas. This is accomplished by geolocalising the addresses of schools and students and by analysing the migration and socio-economic status of students attending both nearby and distant schools.

Subsequently, the paper aims to contribute to the debate on the consequences of school segregation by comparing data from school segregation analyses with data on the risk of school dropout. Data on the risk of school dropout are provided by the municipal administration and refer to the school year 2021-2022. These data, besides highlighting the existence of the phenomenon in primary schools, make it possible to investigate whether school segregation and school dropout are positively correlated.

School compositional effects have been a major concern in debates on the effects of school segregation. The unequal schooling of pupils according to their socio-economic background, with the concentration of pupils of lower and higher socio-economic status (SES) in more differentiated schools, can be linked to an increased compositional effect, which is understood as an additional effect of the school social composition on student performance. Recently, the relevance of the magnitude of school compositional effects has been under debate (Sciffer et al., 2021; Marks, 2021). However, there is a large literature on this additive effect of school composition by socio-economic status (SES) that points to its importance in explaining differences in performance between students and between schools (Sciffer et al., 2022; Perry et al., 2022; Oberti & Savina, 2019; Benito et al., 2014; Dumay & Dupriez, 2008; Palardy, 2008). However, most of these studies have been based on PISA data, little has been said about compositional effects in primary school (Bianchi & Cabrera, 2023).

We draw on two representative samples of 105,259 and 116,510 4th grade primary school students from 28 European countries and 4,683-4,961 schools, taken from the TIMSS 2019 and PIRLS 2021 microdata. These two educational assessments allow us to estimate the effects of school socio-economic composition (SEC) in both mathematics and reading through multilevel linear models (MLM), to compare their magnitude across European countries. Finally, we test with a two-way ANOVA the predicted gains in mathematics and reading for hypothetical desegregation policies for students in different individual SES quintiles across each school SES quintile.

Our results point to at least two relevant considerations. First, compositional effects are larger in mathematics than in reading, and the percentage of variance attributable to differences between schools is smaller for the latter. Thus, while reading is more dependent on family background, mathematics outcomes are more sensitive to school contexts. This implies both that performance in this area will be more adversely affected by situations of school segregation, and that there is greater scope for action in improving mathematics outcomes through school practices.

Second, SEC effects are larger in countries with higher levels of segregation and, as expected, this correlation is stronger for mathematics than for reading. And not only are these differences in SEC effects related to levels of segregation, but in countries with higher levels of segregation, this effect is disproportionately larger for students with lower SES. The performance of pupils at the bottom of the SES distribution is more sensitive to the school context, and experiences a larger expected change when moving from one school SES quintile to another.

This shows how school segregation increases educational inequalities, and has implications for education policy, such as when or where it might be most beneficial to reduce the concentration of lower SES students, or when this improvement in school performance can be driven by school organisation and teaching practices.