Conference Program

Private and publicly subsidised private schools occupy a contested position in contemporary education systems. Although often justified as instruments to diversify educational provision and accommodate parental preferences, a substantial body of research shows that they also play a central role in reinforcing social stratification and school segregation (Ball, 2003; Bonal et al., 2019; Zancajo & Bonal, 2022). While previous studies have conceptualised private schooling as a form of “exit” from public education, less attention has been paid to how this mechanism intersects with urban change and with key moments in students’ educational trajectories. This article addresses this gap by examining how neighbourhood gentrification and the transition from primary to secondary education shape demand for private schooling in Barcelona.

Barcelona provides a particularly informative case. Its education system combines a large publicly subsidised private sector with a school admissions framework that allows families considerable scope to bypass local public schools. At the same time, the city has experienced intense and spatially uneven gentrification, reshaping neighbourhood social composition without necessarily displacing long-term residents (López-Gay et al., 2020). This makes Barcelona especially suitable for analysing how educational choices respond to urban change in contexts where social mixing and inequality coexist spatially. Using longitudinal administrative register data, the analysis focuses on three interrelated processes: the social and contextual determinants of private school enrolment in primary education, changes in private school demand between 2014 and 2023, and the factors associated with students’ transitions from public primary schools to private secondary schools.

The findings show that private education operates as a key mechanism through which families manage perceived social and academic risks in local education markets. Opting out of public schooling is strongly associated with the social composition of nearby schools, the local availability of private provision, and neighbourhood socio-economic characteristics, confirming the role of private education in facilitating selective withdrawal from public provision (Scandurra et al., 2021; Boterman, 2022). However, these dynamics vary across educational stages. In neighbourhoods undergoing gentrification—where new middle-class residents increasingly coexist with disadvantaged populations (López-Gay et al., 2020)—families are less likely to opt out of public education during primary schooling. This suggests that gentrification can initially foster engagement with local public schools, in line with research highlighting selective forms of opting in among middle-class households (Boterman, 2013; Posey-Maddox et al., 2016).

This engagement, however, appears to be fragile. The transition to secondary education emerges as a decisive turning point in families’ schooling strategies. At this stage, the moderating effect of gentrification on private school demand weakens substantially, and many families who previously chose public primary schools move to private or publicly subsidised private secondary schools. These transitions reflect heightened concerns about peer composition, academic differentiation, and future educational pathways as students approach adolescence (Ball, 2003; van Zanten, 2009).

In conclusion, this article shows that selective withdrawal from public education is not a static phenomenon but a process that unfolds over time and across institutional thresholds.