The European Cities Against School Segregation (ECASS) project aims to create innovative solutions to enable local governments to address school segregation in European cities.
Most European education systems face the challenge of integrating migrant and / or refugee students into their schools and communities. Concentration of social problems in specific neighborhoods accentuates early school leaving problems and makes it extremely difficult for children from disadvantaged families to achieve academic success. The growing presence of migrant families also leads to middle-class family strategies, so-called white flight, aimed at fleeing from schools with a greater presence of students of non-Italian origin; the families of the latter, instead, activate processes of cultural emulation that increase the concentration of groups of migrants in specific schools. These and other factors lead to significant levels of the school segregation, which is higher than the residential segregation of the reference neighborhoods. Given the list of costs and benefits, reducing school segregation should be a priority for education policies, but several obstacles make it difficult for local education agencies to develop effective desegregation policies. Among them is a “transfer gap” of existing knowledge on the issue of segregation in the academic field, to policy makers. The ECASS project is conceived as a collaboration between researcher experts on the subject of segregation and local authorities in three cities: Barcelona, Milan and Oslo.
The project will generate innovative solutions in five main policy areas admission policies¨ school supply¨ systems of detection and enrolment of vulnerable students communication policies and priority policies addressed to disadvantaged schools and students.
Funding period
2019-2022
Research group
Costanzo Ranci, Carolina Pacchi, Gianluca De Angelis, Marta Cordini
Funding institution
Unione Europea – Programma Erasmus+
Partners
Comune di Milano
Università Autonoma di Barcellona (UAB)
Comune di Barcellona (Consorci d’Educació de Barcelona, CEB)
Università Norges Miljo-OgBiovitenskaplige di Oslo
Comune di Oslo
