Conference Program

Despite various reform efforts, social background still has a strong influence on a child's educational opportunities in Germany (Busemeyer et al., 2023; OECD, 2023; Scharf et al., 2020). So far, little is paid to the institutional mechanisms that (re)produce inequalities in the everyday structures and practices of the school system. Organizational regulations enshrined in legal and administrative documents can create differentiation processes that systematically disadvantage certain groups of students and perpetuate existing disparities (Böhmer, 2025). One theoretical perspective that has only been used sporadically to date but offers great analytical potential for investigating such mechanisms is the concept of space as a product of social action (Kessl et al., 2016; Löw & Sturm, 2019; Riveros & Nyereyemhuka, 2023).

In Germany, the transition from primary to secondary school represents a decisive moment for the emergence of social inequality and manifests itself in segregated school landscapes – especially in large agglomerations such as Hamburg (Fernandez & Zehetner, 2025; Racherbäumer & Bremm, 2021; Stočić, 2015). The school policy of parental choice, according to which parents can freely choose their children's school regardless of their place of residence, could contribute to reducing such inequalities. Nevertheless, secondary school types – in Hamburg, from grade 5 onwards, a distinction is made between two types of general education schools with different graduation options – are distributed in a striking manner depending on the socioeconomic status of the social environment.

This article addresses a gap in research by focusing on the institutional framework conditions that create socially unequal (educational) spaces (Fernandez & Zehetner, 2025), shifting attention away from individual actors, such as parents or students towards the actions of educational policy actors. The analysis focuses on the question of what influence the right to free school choice has or may have on the socio-spatial distribution of students across different types of secondary schools. Methodologically, the article combines a policy-analytical evaluation of the legal basis for parental choice in Hamburg with a socio-spatial analysis of the school structure. Hamburg is suitable for this, as the city publishes data on schools in the Regional Education Atlas (https://geoportal-hamburg.de/bildungsatlas/) and status indices for social spaces in the annual Social Monitor (BSW Hamburg, 2024) on a small scale, even within district boundaries. In addition, each school in Hamburg is assigned a school social index, which allows conclusions to be drawn about the social composition of the students. These data sets make it possible to examine the distribution of school types and their embedding in different socio-spatial contexts and to discuss the effectiveness of parental choice. A particular focus is placed on the west and southeast of Hamburg, where extreme socioeconomic differences between residents are visible despite short geographical distance. By analysing the interplay of institutional regulations, socio-spatial structure, and school type distribution, it highlights the possibilities and limitations of individual freedom of choice in a socially unequal urban context and how spaces are (re)produced through social actions thus contributes to the debate on the role of school policy control instruments in the reproduction of inequalities.