Project summary
School segregation is currently one of the biggest educational and social challenges facing European countries and cities. The fight against school segregation has direct implications on the right to education, the well-being of children, the quality of public services and social cohesion. The city of Barcelona is among the Catalan cities with the highest levels of school segregation, despite having also been a pioneer in the development of local policies to mitigate this problem. In this context, and with the aim of providing an answer to this question, the Barcelona Education Consortium promoted in 2018 the “Shock Plan against school segregation”, a leading and innovative initiative at European level with the which seeks to significantly reduce school segregation in the city through a wide range of measures. More recently, the approval of the new Admissions Decree by the Government of Catalonia, in 2021, has contributed to strengthening this policy, establishing a regulatory framework that consolidates many of the measures contemplated by the Shock Plan, but also incorporating new instruments to improve the distribution of socially vulnerable students.
The main objective of this project is to determine the impact of the Shock Plan and the Admissions Decree on the distribution of socially vulnerable students among the educational centers of the city of Barcelona, as well as to analyze the operation of the different instruments promoted by these policies. The project aims to capture not only what has been the effect of educational policy on school segregation, but also how these policies are interpreted and affect the behavior of educational centers and families, and how their impact varies depending on the social context , geographical and educational. With this aim, and combining two complementary methodological approaches (impact assessment and realistic assessment), the project aims to provide evidence for political decision-making and the fight against school segregation from a local perspective.