The prevalence and impact of school segregation on education outcomes in Europe and beyond

Abstract

This introductory contribution to this Special Issue elaborates on the link between school segregation and educational inequalities conceptually referencing some state of research. In a next step, a comparative research project on pioneering policies and practices to tackle educational inequalities is introduced, before the Special Issue and its contributions are presented.

School segregation and educational inequalities

School segregation is closely linked to a sociological perspective on inequality. The structure and stratification of education systems have a profound impact on unequal educational outcomes and disparities students’ later life chances, for example, labor market opportunities, political participation, well-being, health, and life expectancy (Hahn, 2022; Owens, 2018; Reardon et al., 2024). Consequently, policy reforms aimed at mitigating inequalities in society often target the education system, which has long been considered one of the driving forces behind societal equality and equity.

School segregation refers to different structural aspects. While it generally refers to the separation of certain groups, segregation takes different forms in different national or regional education system types. In highly-stratified or—as Van de Werfhorst and Mijs (2010) put it—externally-differentiated education systems that predominate in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, segregation is inherently tied to institutional structures that track and stratify students throughout their schooling. At the end of primary education, students are selected into distinct educational tracks (vocational tracks vs academic tracks) of secondary education. For example, most German (Bundesland-specific) school systems track students into different school types at an early age (around the age of 10). This early selection has been extensively discussed in the tracking literature (Schindler, 2017) and is associated with potentially negative effects on the educational aspirations of disadvantaged students (Bittmann and Schindler, 2021). Tracking is intended to stream groups of similar academic abilities into various tracks. However, the allocation to a track is also highly dependent on a student’s social background and other ascribed characteristics (Hadjar and Gross 2016; Van de Werfhorst and Mijs 2010), meaning that tracks are socially segregated. When students are tracked, they are placed in segregated classrooms or even entire schools, with the result that students from different social and ethnic backgrounds and socioeconomic spaces are being separated from one another, leading to a high social segregation in tracked school systems (Boterman et al., 2019).

In less-stratified education systems like those that predominate in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, the US, or Canada, selection into (vocational or academic) tracks does not take place before the ages of 15 or 16 years, with part of the secondary educational stage taking place in comprehensive and integrative schools. However, this does not mean that there is no risk of segregation between social groups, as parental school choice and residential segregation tend to separate students indirectly due to the uneven distribution of school funding and resources across these spatial divides. Economically resourced areas tend to host the advantaged schooling populations, while the schools in deprived areas tend to host the student population lacking resources for a successful uptake of education, and more likely to display lower motivation and potentially problematic behaviors. For example, studies show that in classrooms consisting of economically disadvantaged students, it is difficult for students to help and motivate their classmates with schoolwork requirements due to their own deficits of resources and skills. Moreover, in these schools with a disadvantaged student composition, teachers convey lower aspiration levels in their instruction—which also contributes to higher disadvantages among the deprived student population (cf. Bol and Van de Werfhorst, 2013; Hadjar and Gross 2016; Van de Werfhorst and Mijs, 2010).

Research on school segregation—for example, in Europe and the US—suggests a negative impact on educational outcomes (Gamoran, 2001; Holzberger et al., 2020; Reardon and Owens, 2014; Rumberger and Palardy, 2005; Van Ewijk and Sleegers, 2010). This is especially true for vulnerable students, that is, students from socioeconomically disadvantaged and immigrant backgrounds (e.g. Belfi et al., 2016). Around the world, policy responses aimed at countering school segregation have had a limited impact. In increasingly diverse societies, the growing complexity of the mechanisms driving rising income and ethnic inequalities poses significant challenges to the development of effective educational policies (e.g. Andersson et al., 2010; Oberti and Savina, 2019).

On the one hand, education policies aiming at countering inequalities in academic outcomes among different groups of students unintentionally led to new forms of segregation. For instance, the Lithuanian system offers schooling not only in Lithuanian, but also in Russian and Polish languages (Dabašinskienė and Kubiliūtė, 2021). These publicly funded schools, while important for the integration of language-minority students, led to school segregation along the lines of their language and ethnic background. While the policy aims to support students whose primary language is not the national language or official language taught in schools, its long-term consequences for social inclusion and cohesion might turn less beneficial for the society overall. On the other hand, the expansion and diversification of education systems led to a growing marketization, shadow education of an increasing number of private education providers, growing school choice, and growing competition (e.g. Benz et al., 2025; Karaçay et al., 2025; Lubienski et al., 2022). Given that education remains a key factor for status attainment and status retention, high-status parents (intentionally) enroll their children in certain schools, thus (unintentionally) further contributing to school segregation (e.g. Davies and Aurini, 2008; Dronkers et al., 2010; Pietsch and Stubbe, 2007).

The international project PIONEERED

Some of the contributions of the special issue are linked to the EU-funded Horizon project—PIONEERED “Pioneering policies and practices tackling educational inequalities in Europe” (2021–2024; https://pioneered.uni.lu/). Within the European Commission’s H2020 Call Enhancing Access and Uptake of Education to Reverse Inequalities (TRANSFORMATIONS-22-2020), PIONEERED has been designed to promote educational equality across European education systems by mapping, analyzing, and sharing promising policies and practices tackling educational inequalities. The overall objective of the project has been to inform national and European educational policy and practice tackling inequalities across all educational stages by showcasing the effectiveness, relevance, and impact of pioneering policies and practices that enhance access to, uptake and completion of both formal and non-formal education.

The international project with project partners in Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Spain, and Switzerland followed three steps to meet this general objective:

• Research field (1): Mapping existing and emerging sources of educational inequalities over the course of educational careers from early childhood to tertiary education

• Research field (2): Responses to inequalities—mapping pioneering policies and practices in formal and informal settings from a comparative perspective

• Research field (3): Triangulation and selection of the most promising tools, pioneering policies and practices within and across European countries

An overarching methodological concept of the project related to the innovative MILC framework (Multilevel, Intersectional, Life-Course approach). In addition, the PIONEERED researchers continuously searched for factors and aspects going beyond this approach, that is, to say they remained open for unexpected mechanisms in all research steps (Hadjar et al., 2021; Jobst et al., 2025). The project involved desk research, policy analysis, quantitative secondary analysis of large-scale data sets as well as interviews, focus-groups and “guided tours.”

One of the most useful outcomes of this project was the construction of a comprehensive inventory of pioneering measures that can be used to facilitate discussions on educational policies and practices. After the researchers drew up an initial list of possible measures to combat educational inequalities, these were discussed with national and international stakeholders (representatives of teachers’ unions, parent representatives, student representatives, teacher training, education monitoring). The selected strategies were then described using a systematic framework. In a further step, the research teams visited formal and non-formal educational institutions where the relevant measures are implemented. In addition to guided visits by representatives of the institutions, interviews and group discussions were also held in order to analyze the measures as well as successes and challenges with regard to their implementation. The pioneering policies and practices were then discussed at international workshops, after which the descriptions were adapted and expanded. A final selection was then made by the national research teams. In the following, the common features of these pioneering strategies in the various countries are systematically presented, which are described in detail for each country in Toom et al. (2023) or on the pioneered.uni.lu website and summarized by Hadjar and Torabian (2024).

What are main features of promising policies and practices? With focus on school segregation and its mitigation, comprehensive and inclusive school systems and school settings are the most important feature. Such inclusive settings are characterized by mixed school classes, inclusive pedagogical approaches and forms of individualized teaching and personalized support within a classroom. At the level of the education system, a key feature is a delayed tracking, that is, students are divided into different school branches at a later stage (at the age of 15 or 16). In addition, teachers need to be supported by additional staff (e.g. special educators, pedagogical experts, social workers).

While comprehensive and inclusive school forms are suitable for achieving class compositions in which disadvantaged students benefit, without privileged pupils being threatened by lowering of standards—as outlined earlier and another key aspect of this special issue—it is often residential segregation that promotes educational inequalities. In many European countries, municipalities or districts are characterized by a homogeneous composition of the population—either privileged or disadvantaged—which in turn goes hand in hand with homogeneous compositions of students in schools and classes. There are, therefore, also efforts to attenuate the link between residential segregation and school segregation, for example by taking segregation into account when designing school catchment areas (e.g. Dlabac et al., 2022) or by providing incentives for privileged parents to enroll their children in mixed, inclusive school types. This can be achieved, for example, through special offers and policies in these schools:

• Schools, municipalities or school districts with a disadvantaged population (e.g. many working-class families, migrants) receive additional resources in some European regions. These can be used in the form of more school staff or teachers, or in terms of professional development, school activities, support measures in or outside of schools, work with families and partnerships between schools and communities.

• Multi-professional support services, not just for disadvantaged students but for all students, using early diagnosis of what support is needed and providing early support for all, are also pioneering and available in many countries either as pilots or universally.

• There are also individual support services for particularly vulnerable students to help them achieve qualified school-leaving qualifications despite low motivation and a lack of other resources, sometimes in cooperation with separate non-formal or informal educational institutions and/or individual coaching and counseling inside and outside of school.

• For migrants and language groups who speak languages other than the languages of instruction, there are measures that promote language acquisition. On the one hand, there are language policies that promote multilingualism, but there are also school-related strategies (language practice). These concern not only the formal sector (schools, universities) but also the informal sector (e.g. childcare facilities).

• Bridging—the process of building connections between previously independent units—is another key feature of various pioneering policies and practices. This involves, among other things, fostering closer links between formal institutions (e.g. in schools) and non-formal institutions and activities (e.g. daycare centers or after-school care programs). Examples include partnerships between schools and non-formal childcare institutions within municipalities, as well as collaborations with environments where informal education takes place (e.g. museums, theaters, libraries, families). Bridging also encompasses stronger connections between different school levels, such as merging primary and secondary schools or implementing mentoring programs. For instance, primary school pupils might engage in informal, education-related leisure activities with students from grammar schools or higher education institutions, allowing them to become familiar with other educational levels. In addition, greater involvement of parents in educational institutions can help establish closer links between education and training. Progress meetings between teachers, parents, and students, or parents spending a school day together with their children, may also pose a bridging process.

In sum, promising policies and practices relate not only to the school but also to residential segregation and other forms of gaps. Bridging institutions and actors seems to be key.

Special issue on school segregation

Our collected contributions shed light on multiple effects of school segregation: (a) across various schooling outcomes, such as achievement (e.g. reading and math competency scores) and attainment (e.g. transition into upper-secondary educational tracks, grades, certificates); (b) through educational stages (pre-school, primary, lower- and upper-secondary); (c) within differently structured education systems, that is, comprehensive (e.g. Finland) and highly-stratified/tracked (e.g. Germany, Hungary); (d) across countries in Europe (Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Switzerland), North America (Canada), and Australia.

The goal of the special issue of the International Journal of Comparative Sociology on school segregation is to consolidate new empirical evidence on the impacts of tracking, as well as to contribute to a theoretical framework on both existing and emerging mechanisms behind school segregation (Perry et al., 2022). To achieve this goal, the authors identified and analyzed the best quality data available for respective countries. With regards to research design and methodology, contributions are based on one or more aspects of the MILC approach: multilevel analytical framework (e.g. Hox et al., 2017; Snijders and Bosker, 2012), intersectional inequalities, longitudinal and life-course approach. While the details of the analytical results cannot be directly compared between examined countries, the overall findings are discussed in the context of international research and policy evidence. We also offer recommendations for future research that can serve as an extension to the presented studies or be explored in the context of other countries.

The special issue also contributes to the existing scholarly debate on educational stratification as one of the primary mechanisms behind school segregation. Some of the European education systems are well known for their early tracking policies (e.g. Bol and Van de Werfhorst, 2013), for example, Germany and Luxembourg, and hence a pronounced school segregation predominantly exists along the lines of schools’ socioeconomic composition.

From an empirical point of view, the contributions to this special issue show that:

• The impact of school segregation on achievement outcomes is not uniform across educational stages: While the effect is lower in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and in upper-secondary education, it is high in primary and lower-secondary education, as seen in Germany.

• School socioeconomic segregation is also crucial for educational attainment—for example, what track students attend and what school-leaving certificate they acquire in Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Hungary is significant for their further educational careers and life chances.

• School segregation by socioeconomic background appears to be more detrimental for students’ outcomes than ethnic segregation, as analyzed in Luxembourg and Switzerland.

• Early exposure to school segregation in primary education has a lasting negative effect on achievement in secondary education—as shown in a longitudinal study in Luxembourg.

• Educational marketization seems to diminish educational equity. Comparing Australia and Canada, Australian schooling, which has adopted marketization to a greater degree, exhibits more choice and competition, is more socially segregated, and consequently, has greater inequalities in educational outcomes compared to Canadian schooling.

• No education system is immune to segregation, albeit to a varying degree. The case of Finland shows that, despite being hailed among the most successful countries in international assessment studies such as Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), its education system has an implicit mechanism, namely emphasized classes, leading to educational segregation and unequal outcomes.

• Segregation is a global issue, as this special issue shows for Europe, Canada, and Australia.

Contributions to this special issue

This special issue includes a number of case studies that analyze how national educational systems reproduce educational inequalities and systems of educational segregation. The first article, written by Katri Kleemola, Heidi Hyytinen, Tarja Tuononen, and Auli Toom, focuses on the case of Finland, whose comprehensive schooling system is—at first sight—not substantially affected by school segregation. The authors carried out a systematic literature review based on a final sample of 40 scientific articles, revealing that there are, in fact, signs for segregation processes in Finland. These relate to the regional level or link to the selection of major subjects at certain transitions. Thus, neighborhood segregation, classes with special support, transition to upper-secondary education, and transition to higher education appeared to be the main aspects more vulnerable to segregation. However, the authors also note that despite the existence of segregation in Finland, negative consequences can be partially mitigated, as students can return to earlier educational stages at any time to compensate for disadvantages and acquire missing skills and knowledge. From an international comparative perspective, educational inequalities are still quite small, also comparing different comprehensive schools in Finland to each other or comparing Finland to other low-stratified education systems such as Swedish.

The article by David Glauser, Robin Busse, and Katja Scharenberg compares the stratified education systems of Germany and Switzerland. Their quantitative study is based on survey data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) in Germany and the DAB Panel Study (“Determinanten der Ausbildungswahl und der Berufsbildungschancen”) for German-speaking Switzerland. Their main research questions is whether there is an association between the proportion of low-status and immigrant students as characteristics of student composition with students’ trajectories to post-compulsory education, namely the probability to transition to certain certified school tracks. Results of their study indicate that classroom composition and educational attainment are only weakly linked via classroom-level educational aspirations and achievement. They conclude that in tracked education systems such as the systems in Germany or Switzerland (particularly the German-speaking part), individual characteristics such as social background and related aspects are more important in achievement than classroom composition.

Hungary as an example of a stratified education system in Eastern Europe is studied in the contribution of Zoltán Hermann and Dorottya Kisfalusi. Analyzing the question of how attending a deprived (“high-poverty”) school in grade 8 impacts academic achievement and later educational attainment, they employ an administrative panel data set (Admin3; Databank of the Center for Economic and Regional Studies) containing—among other individual-level data—individuals’ standardized test scores from multiple successive school grades, secondary school completion, and higher education entry, and at the same time, information on family background, place of residence, and school characteristics. Employing the method of propensity score matching, their analyses reveal that attending a high-poverty school is negatively associated with reading scores and secondary education attainment, but no significant association with math scores and—depending on model specification—mixed evidence regarding access to higher education. Authors conclude that results indicate a negative impact of attending a low-aspiration school on educational attainment in a stratified system.

Another study from Eastern Europe focuses on Lithuania and less-stratified education system. This case is at the core of the contribution by Jekatyerina Dunajeva, Taylor Kroezen, and Hanna Siarova. Employing the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PISA for 2018, they analyze the segregation between Lithuanian secondary schools and minority (Russian and Polish) language schools, namely the difference in students’ academic performance in reading, math, and science between these types. Their findings reveal a general disadvantage of minority-language students in the education system of Lithuania, that is, lower academic achievement (reading, math, and science test scores). Considering the segregated system, minority-language children seem to show higher competency scores in segregated minority-language schools than in Lithuanian secondary schools.

The contribution by Emer Smyth and Merike Darmody analyzes the education system of Ireland that is stratified to a lower extent. The authors present Ireland as an interesting case that allows analyzing the impact of school composition and neighborhood effects at the same time. Their data base—the Cohort ’98 of the Growing Up in Ireland panel study—offers opportunities to assess inequalities in primary and secondary schooling. Results of cross-classified multilevel models with upper-secondary school performance (grades) as the key outcome indicate that both school and neighborhood characteristics are linked to lower performance at an upper-secondary educational level, beyond individual factors contributing to inequalities, such as social background. Segregation results in negative consequences both for students attending schools with a high proportion of socioeconomically disadvantaged students, as well as students from a deprived residential neighborhood who achieve lower grades than those in socially mixed or middle-class schools respectively better neighborhoods, even after controlling for social background and prior performance.

The education system of Luxembourg is at the center of the contribution by Ineke M. Pit-ten Cate, Martha Ottenbacher, Aigul Alieva, Taylor Kroezen, Andreas Hadjar, Juliette E. Torabian, Frederick de Moll, and Antoine Fischbach. While the primary education system in Luxembourg—as in the large majority of other countries—is comprehensive and does not include school tracks, secondary education is highly tracked. Drawing on panel data of the Luxembourg school monitoring program “Épreuves Standardisées,” the authors analyze how individual student characteristics and school segregation in primary education (grade 3) affects students’ track placement in secondary school (grade 9) and academic achievement growth (German reading comprehension and maths) between primary school grade 3 and in grade 9. Results of multilevel mixed-effects models show that—on the individual level—male students and students originating from families with parents of a lower educational level as well as certain immigrant backgrounds appear to be disadvantaged regarding track placement, even controlling for prior performance. Considering school composition, the percentage of students from families with low socioeconomic status, negatively affects the odds of being recommended to the academic (highest) track. Furthermore, the attended track in Grade 9 had an impact on achievement growth.

Finally, the special issue directs its focus beyond the European education landscape, as Laura Perry, Ee-Seul Yoon, and Christopher Lubienski compare Canada and Australia in their contribution on the effects of the marketisation of schooling systems that originally had been fostered to reduce educational inequalities but may have had an opposite effect. They base their analysis on PISA data, particularly the waves 2009 and 2018. Results of their analysis of similar countries derived from their causal-comparative design indicate that the Australian system(s), being more strongly marketized with more choice and competition, is in fact more socially segregated and more prone to educational inequalities—and even less effective—than the Canadian system(s).

Across the country cases considered in this special issue, school segregation appears to foster educational inequalities. A main mechanism behind this link is school and classroom composition. At the same time, school segregation seems to be strongly linked to residential segregation (aligning with findings of Böhlmark et al., 2016; Bygren and Szulkin, 2010; Fleischmann et al., 2012). While less-segregated systems and measures to reduce segregation appear to be fruitful to tackle educational inequalities, highly-stratified structures seem to contribute to the persistence of inequalities.

While the current special issue offers important new empirical evidence across education outcomes and education systems, existing empirical and theoretical gaps remain while new gaps emerge. These include the relationship between school segregation and emerging skills—digital, green and sustainable skills, socio-emotional skills, as well as pro- and anti-social behaviors and other non-academic outcomes, including students’ physical and mental health. Furthermore, the continued collection of life-course data and the increasing ability to link educational data with administrative register provide opportunities to examine the long-term impact of school segregation on adult life outcomes: socioeconomic, health, and beyond. Hence, more research is needed into the causes and consequences of segregation.