Conference Program

Since the 1980s, European countries have liberalised families’ school choices. This liberalisation has proceeded along two main directions: the expansion of the private sector, through an increase in private schools and greater public support for attendance at these schools, and the loosening of the link between place of residence and school allocation within the public system, which has made the correspondence between catchment area and school assignment less binding in the admissions process.

A growing body of research shows that the expansion of education privatisation contributes to increasing school segregation and weakening equal educational opportunities. Alongside the dynamics directly affecting the private sector, the liberalisation of school choice has also fostered processes of marketisation within public education systems, gradually blurring the boundary between public and private. In a context of increasing competition for pupil enrolments, public schools are encouraged to adopt strategies typically associated with the private sector, shaping their educational offer and organisational practices to attract socially advantaged families.

Against this background, the paper examines the mechanisms through which this progressive blurring of the boundary between public and private unfolds within the public primary school system of Bologna, with particular attention to its implications for school segregation. Bologna represents an interesting case: as the private sector plays a limited role at the primary level (around 7%), competition among families for access to desirable schools takes place largely within the public system. This occurs within an institutional setting characterised by a school quasi-market and a dense distribution of schools across the city.

The analysis focuses on a specific neighbourhood (Bolognina) characterised by pronounced socio-spatial inequalities, where large public housing estates coexist with areas recently affected by processes of gentrification. Drawing on qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews and observations conducted between 2025 and 2026 with teachers, school principals, parents and public administration officials, the paper reconstructs: (1) the mechanisms through which public schools seek to enhance their attractiveness by shaping their educational offer and adopting practices that contribute to selecting their student intake; and (2) the effects of these dynamics on the socio-ethnic composition of schools and on processes of school segregation and social cohesion.

The findings show that, in a neighbourhood characterised by a high concentration of public housing and emerging gentrification processes, native middle-class families become a scarce and contested resource among public schools. Their presence is associated with reputational advantages and greater school attractiveness, with consequences for staff allocation and teachers’ working conditions, as well as increased pressure on local authorities to secure additional resources. In this context, schools strategically mobilise their educational offer and professional resources to retain middle-class families within their catchment areas while attracting others from neighbouring areas, contributing to polarisation between schools in close spatial proximity, even within the same comprehensive school and under the same leadership. These dynamics are also fuelling growing tensions and forms of protest among local residents, raising questions about the implications of increasing competition between public schools not only for equal educational opportunities but also for social cohesion.