Conference Program

Problem
Educational inequality has long been a central concern in European education policy. In response, governments increasingly develop evidence-informed administrative instruments—such as school social indices—to identify disadvantaged schools and guide targeted interventions. A prominent example is the German Startchancen Programme (SCP), launched in 2024, supporting about 4,000 disadvantaged schools across Germany.

A key governance mechanism concerns the selection of participating schools. According to the Startchancen programme federal–state agreement, states may rely on a school social index or define selection criteria covering poverty and migration. A school social index (SSI) aggregates multiple indicators of disadvantage into a composite score through a defined calculation procedure, enabling systematic comparison and prioritization of schools. By contrast, sets of indicators (SoI) or selection criteria consist of individual variables used separately (Weishaupt, 2016). In Germany’s federal system, where each state develops its own approach, this leads to different operationalizations of disadvantage and varying understandings of which schools require targeted support.

Purpose

This paper presents the first step of a longitudinal policy analysis. It reconstructs the governance instruments used across the federal states, distinguishing between aggregated SSI and SoI. Thus, it analyses how disadvantage is operationalized within the Startchancen Programme (1), for which policy purposes the indicators are used (2), and how these instruments are institutionally embedded (3).

Theoretical perspective
Educational disadvantage is widely understood as a multidimensional phenomenon shaped by intersecting social positions such as socioeconomic background, migration history, language, and spatial inequalities (Walgenbach, 2012). These dimensions influence students’ educational opportunities and learning conditions. In education policy, such constellations are translated into administrative indicators (e.g. social indices) that operationalize disadvantage by selecting and combining measurable dimensions.

To examine the normative implications of these operationalizations, the analysis draws on Nancy Fraser’s three-dimensional conception of social justice (Fraser, 1995; 2010), distinguishing between redistribution, recognition, and representation as key dimensions of educational equity.

Methodology
The study draws on a comparative document analysis of legal and administrative regulations (Prior, 2003). Publicly available policy documents and legal regulations were systematically collected and compiled in a comparative matrix capturing key features such as indicator composition, weighting procedures, and policy purposes.

To analyse how educational disadvantage is operationalized, the SSI and SoI were examined using qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz & Rädiker, 2024). The coding scheme was developed inductively and deductively based on theoretical perspectives on multidimensional disadvantage.

Findings and Discussion

The analysis reveals a heterogeneous landscape across federal states. While all states address the dimensions of poverty and migration required by the federal–state agreement, not all used SSI. Across states, disadvantage is primarily operationalized through indicators related to socioeconomic conditions and migration, sometimes complemented by individual date like learning outcomes. However, indicator selection and weighting vary considerably, leading to different constructions of which schools and student populations are considered disadvantaged. These variations illustrate how multidimensional educational disadvantage is translated into distinct data-led administrative instruments and underline the importance of policy design for understanding the equity implications of educational reforms, while also questioning the effectiveness of such large-scale measures.