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.

Socio-economic segregation in UK schools has primarily been explored through analysing Free School Meals (FSM) as a marker of deprivation. We seek to explore the ‘secret garden’ of UK school segregation research, providing three new insights to understanding social segregation in UK schools. Firstly, we analyse social class segregation moving beyond a binary measure of socio-economic inequality. Secondly, we include private schools - a major source of inequality within British schooling, often omitted due to missing data. Finally, we use administrative data to undertake pan-UK analysis with a greater degree of geographical and school type detail than has previously been possible in comparisons between Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and England. Using first year university records from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) for 2017-2019, we construct parental National Statistical Socio-Economic Classification (NSSEC) profiles for 3269 post-16 institutions across the UK. We apply the multigroup Mutual Information Index (M) and its normalised variants (H, LS) to quantify segregation at four geographic scales: home nation, English region, local authority and individual school. At a UK-wide scale segregation decreases by 22% if we exclude private schools and we find substantial geographical variation with private schools having a larger effect on school segregation in cities, particularly London. Fixed effects models for England reveal that private or selective school status and high local FSM prevalence each increase a school’s local segregation score, and these effects intensify in more disadvantaged local authorities. The findings demonstrate that private schooling amplifies class-based segregation beyond what FSM-based analyses capture.

In recent decades, the transformations of welfare regimes, characterized by the erosion of traditional safety nets and a tendency toward more localized forms of welfare delivery (Andreotti & Mingione 2016), have increased socio-spatial disparities in access to services essential for people well-being. Education represents a critical domain of this transformation, as recent market-oriented reforms have led to the expansion of private schooling and to a greater responsibility assumed by local governance actors for public education provision. Such shifts have contributed to increasing spatial inequalities in educational opportunity. Affluent areas often concentrate attractive public and private schools, whereas disadvantaged neighborhoods have lower-quality public schools that face competitive pressures from private institutions (Owens & Candipan, 2019). While several studies have shown that these spatial disparities in educational opportunity intensify school segregation (Oberti & Savina, 2019) and academic achievement gaps (Claes & Moulin, 2026), surprisingly less attention has been paid to their broader political consequences (Cremaschi et al. 2025; Nyholt, 2023). This study aims to help fill this gap in the literature by examining how spatial inequalities in public schools within increasingly privatized systems affect both conventional and contentious forms of political participation.

Our argument is that the uneven spatial distribution of public and private schools does not only reorganize educational opportunities but may also generate grievances that can transform the relationship between citizens and the State. We anticipate that exposure to (good quality) public school deprivation may undermine individuals’ perceptions of meritocracy and trust in institutions, which can ultimately foster political resentment. Importantly, these dynamics likely vary by social class, given that lower-class people are more dependent on public services. To what extent does spatial inequalities in education opportunity relate to political discontent? Does the relationship between local educational conditions and political discontent vary by social class?

We conduct this research in Chile, one of the most unequal countries in the world where the availability and quality of schools vary considerably across municipalities. We combine data from the Chilean Longitudinal Social Survey (2018-2023) with administrative information on schools. Results from multilevel regression models indicate that local deprivation in public school is associated with distinct political responses. Among lower-income groups, limited and low-quality public provision is linked to low-resource mobilization (e.g., petition, social media), while wealthier individuals respond through high-resource actions such as strikes. At the same time, declining levels of public education provision are associated with support for right-wing parties. We show that the effects are significantly stronger for education than for other key welfare services, like health.

Overall, this article advances the literature on the geography of discontent by showing that beyond economic and cultural marginalization, spatially uneven welfare provision, particularly in education, constitutes a crucial determinant of political behaviors. We also contribute to longstanding research on social class and political behavior by showing that lower-income groups, who are more dependent on public provision, are more likely to mobilize politically in contexts of welfare deprivation. Third, we show that political reactions to institutional neglect encompass different and non-mutually exclusive forms.

In the French residence-based school assignment system, where access to public schools is tied to place of residence, one might expect growing social mix in neighbourhoods to lead to more diverse schools. However, this link is disrupted as families can opt out of their assigned public school by enrolling in publicly funded private schools. Recent studies across several French cities consistently indicate that about half of observed middle-school segregation stems from residential sorting, while the remaining half is produced by family school-choice strategies (Boutchenik et al., 2021; Souidi, 2024; Lécuyer et al., 2025).

Changes in the school-aged population associated with gentrification can thus produce different outcomes at school level (Boterman, 2020). We focus on working-class and socially mixed neighbourhoods in the Paris metropolitan area, which have seen an influx of upper-middle-class households yet where growing residential diversity does not translate into changes in the social composition of local public schools. Our quantitative analysis uses individual and aggregate-level data to evaluate the extent and determinants of school choices and to compare the social composition of school catchment areas with that of local public schools. Our results show that private enrollment contributes to a widening gap between residential and school composition.

However, opting out through private education is not specific to gentrifying contexts but is also widespread among upper-class families living in advantaged areas, even when the local public schools remain socially advantaged. This raises questions about what the choice of private school in working-class or mixed neighbourhoods reveals concerning inter-class and inter-ethnic relations (Raveaud & van Zanten, 2006; Oberti, 2007), compared to residential relocation or private enrolment in advantaged contexts. We complement this analysis with semi-structured interviews conducted in a gentrifying municipality.

Finally, our study highlights how school choice operates not only as a response to residential location but also as a driver of it. While some households strategically relocate within preferred catchment areas (Lareau & Goyette, 2014; Owens, 2017; Ramond & Oberti, 2020), access to private schooling may conversely reduce the perceived risks associated with disadvantaged school environments and thereby facilitate upper-middle class settlement in working-class neighbourhoods (Candipan, 2020).

The possibility of opting out of local public schools is therefore not merely a consequence of neighbourhood change but also one of its enabling conditions, with mixed implications for both residential and school segregation.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of research conducted since 2023 on the emergence of a new private higher education sector in France known as “bachelors”, an English literal translation of the French term “licence” used to refer to a private equivalent of the first cycle of university studies in France. However, these programs do not correspond to any defined degree and exploit a vague regulatory framework (Ingrao, 2025), allowing for a variety of recognition, ranging from no recognition to equivalence to a licence, including professional titles and the possibility of work-study programs made possible by the 2018 reform of apprenticeships in France.

These are expensive programs, costing an average of €10,000 per year, offering training in various sectors such as business, management, engineering, art and audiovisual professions, as well as IT and environmental issues. “Bachelors” are presented as a private neoliberal alternative (van Zanten, 2019) to the traditional French higher education system and therefore fall between public universities and the French system of Grandes Écoles, both public and private. Given their cost (equivalent to private Grandes Écoles programs) and their marketing strategy, which presents them as an alternative to a public higher education system that is portrayed as lacking in individual support and professional integration, the emergence of this new private higher education sector raises questions about the resulting reconfigurations of socioeconomic inequalities within French higher education.

So, which students enroll in “bachelor's” programs? Do they represent a new pathway for middle- and upper-class children with economic capital? Or, conversely, thanks in particular to the apprenticeship mechanism, do they represent a form of access to higher education for a new student population (Lemistre, 2021)?

To answer these questions, this work draws on a mixed method approach that seeks to understand the supply and demand for “bachelors” in France, combining observations, web scraping, and survey data. I draw on 30 hours of ethnographic observation at student fairs. I also draw on a corpus of 518 files presenting “bachelor's” programs, compiled using a method of automatic online data extraction from two program directories for 2023-2024: Parcoursup (listing all public higher education programs after the baccalaureate, as well as some private programs) and Parcourprivé, the private platform offered by the French National Federation of Private Education. Finally, I draw on the secondary use of data from the Céreq Génération 2021 survey, which studies the career paths and professional integration of those who have left the education system since 2021.

This research shows thus that “French bachelors” represent a real social intermediary between universities, which are absorbing the influx of students from the third wave of mass education (Coulangeon, 2008), and the Grandes Écoles, which are still very socially unjust (Bataille & Falcon, 2018). They tend to attract students from a less privileged middle class that is more ethno-racially diverse than the elite, but still seeking to distinguish themselves from the new university populations (Bodin & Orange, 2018).

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.

This paper examines the hypothesis that schools are increasingly becoming “urban amenities”. The findings show that this pattern may apply to some private schools, but much less to public schools in the French cities studied here, despite a catchment area system that closely ties access to public schools to place of residence.

Some research suggest that, in countries with a catchment-area system, parents are more likely to consider the characteristics of local schools than in countries with a system of free school choice (Boterman et al., 2019). In the United States for instance, sociologists highlight that public schools are increasingly becoming urban amenities that urban planners can leverage to attract socially advantaged families, particularly in city centers (Cucchiara, 2013; Nafaa & Maaoui, 2025). The liberalization of school choice in certain cities—through the creation of charter schools, for example—would thus weaken the link between school and residential choice (Ely & Teske, 2015).

My study questions this hypothesis in the French context, where there is a system of catchment area in public schools but not in private ones. Because they are strongly funded by the state, private schools are not very expensive, and 17.3% of primary and secondary education students were enrolled in private schools in 2023.

I conducted ninety-three interviews with middle- and upper-class parents in socially diverse neighborhoods within the city centers and suburbs of two regional French cities. While school choice sometimes influenced families’ residential trajectories, very few interviewees considered their catchment area when choosing where to live. Conversely, several did consider the location of private schools. This observation leads me to question how parents perceive public and private schools and their anchoring within the urban landscape.

I first show that, before having children in school, parents rarely perceive public schools as services that vary locally. It is through the concrete experience of parenthood that they see differences between public schools, particularly in terms of the student populations they serve. Since it is primarily the transition to middle school that is a source of concern in France, this worry may arise well after the decision to move to a new neighborhood—a decision often made around the time children are born. Encouraged by the Republican ideal of a centralized and egalitarian school system, this relative absence of early concern is also made possible by the availability of affordable private schools, which provide an alternative for middle- and upper-class families who realize that their local school does not suit them.

Conversely, parents who prefer private education pay closer attention to school locations. Prestigious private schools can be viewed as “amenities” of affluent neighborhoods, as their presence is a feature of the urban landscape that contributes to making these neighborhoods appealing for upper-class families. This challenges the idea that school districts significantly influence families’ residential choices and instead suggests that the location of private schools is likely to have a greater impact on residential trajectories of some parents.