 everyone and thank you for participating in this webinar offered by the European School Education Platform, the European Commission's platform for school education in Europe. My name is Maria Elena and I will be your host for today. So for this webinar we have invited Professor Xavier Bonal who is a professor of sociology at the Universitat Autonoma in Barcelona. He holds strong knowledge on the field of education, educational policies and global development overall. So today along with Professor Bonal we will reflect on the challenges that European cities face in the context of increasing fragmentation and polarization and he will present us the main outcomes of the project European cities against school segregation. Before we begin I would like to remind you that this webinar is recorded. Moreover towards the end of the webinar my colleague Marta or me will share with you through the chat an evaluation form which we kindly invite you to fill in. Last but not least we invite you to share any thoughts, questions, remarks, comments through the chat and we will gladly reply to them towards the end of the webinar. Thank you very much again for being here. Xavier, the floor is yours. You can also set your screen now. Yeah, immediately I will do. Thank you so much Maria Elena for the introduction and I'm very pleased to participate in this webinar on on the strategies on the school segregation. I'm going to share my screen in a moment if it responds. You you can take some time it's okay. I hope you can see the screen right now. Yes perfectly. So I have thought to organize this presentation in two different parts. In the first part I will introduce basic concepts about what is a school segregation and what is the main situation in most European cities. And in the second part I will introduce a recent European project was funded by the Erasmus platform. The project is called ECAS, European Cities Against the School Segregation. It's been developed among three different cities, European cities and for three years we worked together research centers and also local educational authorities in these three cities to design and to and to produce different different tools to tackle a school segregation. So in the first part just to start with the presentation if I put this image of course no one would recognize here a European city. It's something more common to see in the developing world. It's more common to see for instance in many Latin American cities that have a lot of inequalities, high levels of inequalities is actually the continent with the highest inequality in the world. But what is very extreme in this context as we can see is a very pronounced residential segregation. We have very close areas that are incredibly different in terms of housing, in terms of services, in terms of facilities. Of course as we know and as we can imagine this is one of the main causes of school segregation that is actually affecting most cities around the world and also the European cities but we cannot reduce and that's one of the main messages today. We cannot reduce the question of a school segregation to the problems of residential segregation. Of course the relationship is very strong, is very pronounced, where we have schools in territories that are extremely poor. It's very common of course to find high levels of concentrations of children with learning difficulties, of children from ethnic or social or low income groups and then in the other side in upper class neighborhoods of course the conditions of schooling, the number also of private schools it's much higher. This relationship is of course unavoidable. What is less clear is to understand that this is the unique relationship that exists with residential segregation and school segregation. There's many aspects that actually intervene in the reproduction of a school segregation and many of them have to do with education policies themselves. That's one of the main interesting aspects that we have dealt with in the project that I mentioned before which is the importance that we give to education policies themselves as strategies that can sometimes help, sometimes induce processes of school segregation. In terms of definition it's very easy and common to identify school segregation as something very simple. We understand school segregation as processes in which we have a lot of intraschool homogeneity. So schools that really share very similar type of pupils in terms of social class, in terms of ethnic groups, in terms of sex for instance, in terms of different variables which is a campaign but intraschool heterogeneity. So strong differences between schools and strong similarities and strong commonalities within the schools. This type of definition just to make it clear as a concept, it's good to identify that the question of who is very important. So we have two main implications to take into account here. We talk about segregation of whom. The first thing when we define segregation is to identify a group that is segregated. It can be migrant students, it can be Roma children for instance, low socioeconomic status students, girls. So we should to identify the group. The second variable that is important, the second implication is to identify the territory. Strictly speaking when we talk about segregation, we cannot talk about schools as segregated as such. Schools can have levels of concentration of an every minority or Roma children or whatever. But when I talk about segregation, I always have to refer to a territory. It can be a neighborhood, a district, a municipality, because what I try to measure is the uneven distribution of children with certain characteristics among the schools of that territory. So strictly speaking, when we talk about segregation, we will have to refer necessarily to a territory. It can be in a city, in a neighborhood, in a district. Usually what it makes more sense is to talk about territories that would be logical to think about spaces that it's reasonable to think about even distributions of different types of students in that territory. If we talk about the country for instance, talking about school segregation in a whole country, it doesn't make a lot of sense because we actually don't think or we don't actually reflect on distributing students among all the schools of that territory. When we talk about segregation also, another interesting thing conceptually speaking is to differentiate between the types of school segregation. We have important levels of school segregation between sectors, public schools versus private schools. In some systems it's less common because public schools are by far the majority of schools, but in many systems and in European cities that's very much the case, for instance in my own city in Barcelona, we have a high proportion of private schools and we have a clear social division in terms of schooling of the types of pupils that are enrolled in the public system or are enrolled in the private one. We have also segregation between schools no matter whether they are public or private, so beyond the school sectors of course we measure segregation between schools in a territory. Within each school sector actually we know that there are high levels of school segregation and usually within schools segregation it's higher than between school segregation. Another interesting aspect of segregation is that we can measure also within schools of our classrooms so not just between the schools but I can have heterogeneous schools for instance that use the tracking system in the in the enrolling of their children so they have different classes which are classified depending on the performance of students which sometimes correlates very highly with the social background of those students and finally we have another dimension which is differentiation within or between catchment areas. This is a bit more complex aspect as you probably already know catchment areas are geographical territories that usually give preference in terms of enrollment to students that are residencing that are living in that area so they have proximity points let's say to attend those schools. What happens that if I have sometimes territories or catchment areas that are socially incredibly different then it's very common that I will reproduce between catchment areas strong differences while if I have catchment areas that are more balanced in terms of social distribution and the characteristics of schools it will be much more easy to balance the social compositions of those schools. This only operates in systems that have catchment areas which usually have more than two or three schools within that catchment area. We have cities that have one catchment area per school this system would not apply but we have other systems other cities that have territories that include more than one two or three or five or even ten schools which actually can make a difference in terms of how in terms of the draw of these catchment areas and the effects it has on a school segregation. So again when we talk about segregation we usually will refer to these type of groups segregation between boys and girls for instance as you know there are systems that still separate children or some in some religious schools for instance can be a common practice school differentiation between sexes ethnic origin social class language we could add here religion if you like any other variable that actually differentiates students what is important as I mentioned before is that we are able to identify and to define which groups are we referring to. Okay if there's something that is not sufficiently clear and I hope then after the my presentation we will have time to discuss and to and to and to respond to your questions but let me make things a little bit more complicated we have just defined what is a school segregation we have defined the concept the different types of segregation let me now introduce two different forms of measuring a school segregation of understanding a school segregation which are very complementary but are very important to differentiate the first one is what we call isolation or exposure which has to do a lot with the idea of concentration and the second one has to do with imbalance okay when let me just immediately introduce these differences when we talk about isolation we refer that segregation is measured according to the proportion of various groups present in a school so according to this measure for instance a black student attending a school with a very high proportion of other black students would be considered racially isolated so it's very easy to understand this concept of concentration I can have schools for instance in my city there might be schools that have over 80 85 or 90 percent of migrant students that would I would refer to these schools as schools that are racially or ethnically isolated okay in the second definition what we talk about is imbalance which refers to the extent to which specific groups are distributed unevenly across schools and in that case I'm not just measuring the concentration if it's very high in some specific schools but how the distribution of students that are in the in that area in that territory of reference are unevenly distributed among the different schools let me give you one example to differentiate the two concepts which I think it's by being important let's imagine that we have a neighborhood that has 75 percent of migrant students which would be of course a very high proportion and in that neighborhood we have only four schools school a b c and e and you have here in the screen the proportion of migrant students of of the schools of the neighborhood so you would see that school a has exactly the same proportion of the students of the territory the school b and a school d have a higher proportion and a school c a little down proportion this territory is clearly isolated so the level of exposure or the level of isolation of students of migrant students is very high as we can see but this is not a territory that is necessarily segregated in terms of imbalance because as you can see the distances of the proportion of migrant students in each schools with regard to the average is not especially high okay so we have a very isolated neighborhood but not especially segregated neighborhood when i go to this second type of example i have a school segregation in a in a neighborhood here that has 35 percent of migrant students and here the differences are much higher between the schools we have school a with only 20 percent school b with 10 percent school c with 65 and school d with 80 so this level of isolation is not especially high in this neighborhood but the level of segregation the differences among schools are particularly high i'm i'm just referring to this difference because it's very important that we when we talk about the school segregation and when we try to deal with the question of a school segregation is very important that we try to understand what are the characteristics what are the patterns of inequality of a spatial inequalities in a given territory of our neighborhood so it's very different the policies that i will have to develop if i have schools that are clearly in area that is clearly isolated socially and educationally isolated compared to some areas that the problem that they have is more of imbalance of the unequal distribution among the schools of the territory so that's that is important because you can probably and easily recognize that in your own cities you can think about territories that have more the characteristics of of isolation and the second one the characteristics of imbalance so when we think about the strategies that we will have to design to tackle a school segregation understanding the patterns of reproduction of segregation is something that is extremely important just as a matter of information the most common index to measure a school segregation and to measure imbalance specifically it's what we call the dissimilarity index we have also an isolation index to measure whether the schools are especially isolated but this one is very common to measure imbalance or segregation and the dissimilarity index is very easy to interpret that's a good thing it's an index that goes from zero to one zero meaning absence of segregation means perfect equality and one meaning perfect inequality that would be that all children of certain characteristics are all concentrated in a single school so normally never is one and never is zero of course all the indexes move between zero and one the common knowledge tells us that usually all if we have indexes below zero point three that would be a low level of school segregation between zero point three and zero point five moderate levels and over zero point five would be high levels of school segregation the the the easy thing about the interpretation of the dissimilarity index is that it's very easy to understand we consider that the dissimilarity index expresses the proportion of those students that should change the school in order to have a perfect balance so if we have a zero point five dissimilarity index in a territory that means that 50 percent of students should move from one school to another to achieve the perfect balance okay that's just a measure it doesn't mean that this is a policy necessarily okay i'm just talking about how to measure and how to tackle inequality i will not have time to go into this but i will share the presentation with the school education platform and then they can distribute it to you but just in case you are interested in understanding more the mechanisms of reproduction of a school segregation there is this very funny type of website website which is called the parable of the polygons that allows you to it's like a game it allows you to play to understand how the mechanisms of segregation operate and it's very easy to observe for instance how the the unhappy triangles or the unhappy squares try depending on their preferences move to understand something that is very simple and that's the main message i want to to to hear share with you which is the idea that the idea the simple idea that even if we have relatively levels of tolerance that are very high let's imagine that we have a level of tolerance of only 20 percent let's say which means that i will be happy to be in a school when students that are like me are at least at least can be 80 percent even different than me 20 different from me i would accept and below that i would change the school which means a high level of tolerance when we add these levels of tolerance among all participants that are choosing a school the final result produces a segregation that is much higher than the sum of the individual preferences tomas shelling an economist in 1971 actually showed this with a model of understanding how segregation was reproduced and the question is that if i want to move because i'm not happy with those that i have close to me i will produce a chain effect which actually will alter the decisions of my neighborhoods too so what we have here is a system in which one starts moving and the others actually in a chain reproduce this mobility which goes different levels of polarization and a school segregation this for instance it's very interesting to understand how the white flight operates the white flight was a concept that was used in the u.s when the policies that the supreme court actually decided in terms of boozing meaning taking black children to white districts and rolling them in white schools produced a reaction from the from the the the the middle classes and the population of flying from these neighborhoods because they were actually perceiving that many black children were arriving to their school so they opt for going somewhere else to other private schools and so on so just to understand these mechanisms how and why and how a school segregation is reproduced i think playing with this with these examples are are something very positive okay let me go because i'm concerned about the time too to have time to talk a little bit about ecas the ecas project as i said was it run from 2019 until 2022 we had six partners working together both research centers and local educational authorities funded but by the erasmus plus program with the idea of producing and generating tools that would be useful for local educational authorities and to design together actually strategies to tackle school segregation i will talk later on about the website and it will be very interesting that if you have the time to have a look at it you can grab some interesting ideas on on what to do i will escape also these in the presentation you have a link to a video that is also in the ecas website it's a very short video it's like four minutes but it describes with cartoons very basically what is the school segregation and what you can find in the ecas website and what type of strategies we have developed to to to tackle school segregation but as it is something that you can easily check at home i prefer just to escape it now and focus more on some of aspects of the of the project that that they want to share with you so this is ecas these are the three cities but that participated in the project oslo milano and barcelona as the coordinating cities the idea was very much to focus on on finding these innovative solutions for local governments and based on the principle of collaboration between policymakers and researchers so the idea of transferability of knowledge and exchange was very common and very very present in in the project why we did that it's easy to understand we know from evidence also from some interesting research that we are witnessing an increasing residential and school segregation in european cities both of these advantage and and migrant students there are some complete analysis about how these levels of economic inequalities in this occasion go together with residential segregation sometimes you can have higher levels of economic inequalities that do not translate into residential segregation but this time this is not happening we have levels of polarization between groups we did also because we think that there isn't clear need to produce knowledge and solutions you know policy the main that many in many occasions it's characterized by political reluctancy or resistance so it's not easy that policymakers engage in tackling and finding solutions against the school segregation it's a very sensitive aspect of course because we are talking about school choice and these type of aspects as we as we know are very sensitive to to the wishes of the middle classes especially we wanted and we had very clear that the local level is a very important level for developing effective education policies and particularly when it comes to ideas that have to take into account very much the context in which inequalities are reproduced the potential of mutual learning and also of course that was an opportunity to position the struggle against the school segregation at the forefront of european education policies at the end of 2022 the end of last year we organized an international conference in Barcelona we joined not only the participant cities but many other european cities in that conference to to share experiences and to learn to to have spaces of mutual learning against the school segregation just for you to give a very snapshot of the the three cities we chose these cities also because they are different models of reproduction of a school segregation i'm just taking a few minutes about this the description of these three cities because i think it's very important that we reflect on what are the characteristics of school segregation in our in our cities because not all of them are reproduced with the same patterns and then also the strategies that we have to develop depending on these patterns of our reproduction are very different we have first milano milano it's a free school choice model actually so what you see in this map is a map of catchment areas each catchment area is represents an area of one public school so i think there's 140 or 137 catchment areas but families have always guaranteed the access to this catchment area the school in the catchment area but also have the possibility if there is room to some other schools to opt for this school outside the catchment area okay so we have a free school choice characteristic of a quasi market system 137 catchment area relatively low levels of residential segregation compared to other cities high supply and demand of private schools there are also a significant market for private schools in the city and high degree of school autonomy which even affects the capacity of schools to to offer a higher or higher or lower number of school places and these are some of the main patterns of school segregation we have high difference between the school segregation and residential segregation as you can see and that happens in many occasions the level of school segregations are higher than the levels of residential segregation we have an unequal distribution of the private subsidized schools that are concentrated in and around the city center milano it's organized socially in rings if you check the center of milano you will find the middle and upper classes and the more you go to the outskirts of the city the the social level of of individuals go lower and and then of course that generates mobility towards the city center for the italian families the idea of the white flight if they are more mixed with migrants in the outskirts they move to the center and half of italian families and the 40 percent of foreigners opt out from the local school that means that even among the migrants they have high levels of mobility it's very common because they have this free school choice system but the patterns of mobility are very different italian families go to the center migrant families go to other schools in the periphery oslo is completely different oslo is the system which is based on geographic location the culture of schooling is very much based on a local school principle and limited levels of school choice so you have an assigned school which depends on when you live the city has 115 catchment area one municipal school in each one of these catchment areas they have high levels of residential segregation so the problem is that the reproduction of school segregation actually reflects the high levels of residential segregation the private subsidized schools is very low as it happens in many with the exception probably of sweden in many in many scandinavian countries and have a moderate degree of a school autonomy here of course we have low difference between school segregation and residential segregation referring to immigrant background and homogenous geography of educational opportunities more or less in terms of distribution but the the correlation between school segregation residential segregation is high school choice mainly through residential mobility operates that means that if you are concerned with going to some specific school you probably will have to change your residence because otherwise you won't have the possibility to go there they have relatively low levels of opting out of not going to local schools compared to milano and of course there are also some problems of isolated districts both at the upper and the lower levels of income and finally barcelona which is a special case because it's it's interesting because it's something in the middle milano is free choice uh oslo is geographically based systems of allocation and barcelona is a controlled choice system a controlled choice means that families have the possibility to express their preferences when they choose but the municipality in this case has the capacity to balance supply and demand to ensure that educational planning operates in a better way and also to operates with an equity principle okay so in our case we have a system that includes 29 catchment areas so the system gives priority if you want to go to the schools within the catchment area unless priority if you go to some other schools outside of the of the catchment area each catchment area might have from let's say the minimum number of schools would be eight or ten the maximum can be over 40 uh these catchment areas are unequal in terms of composition and we have relatively also low levels of of uh residential segregation and high levels of supply and demand of private subsidized schools so the problem of school segregation in barcelona one of the main characteristics is what i refer before as inequality or segregation between sectors and here we have even higher levels of difference between a school segregation and residential segregation when it comes to foreign students you can see that the levels of residential segregation are very moderate uh and are they are quite distributed in different neighborhoods of the city but that doesn't prevent higher levels of school segregation because we have in a lot of differences between schools we have an unequal geography of educational opportunities areas in the in the city center are with the except of this neighborhood are just well off and these the two extremes on the north and the south are the poorest areas of the city and even we have this control system of of school choice we have high levels of opting out 33 percent of families opt for schools that are not of the same catchment area and of course we have also the existence of isolated districts both upper and lower income i'm just presenting these characteristics for you to to underline the importance of how context and the type of school admissions policy and the system that organizes how families choose a school and role in a certain school are very important to understand how patterns of school segregation are reproduced so all the instruments that we design that we uh think about what's what are the best policies have to be always adapted to the context what works in Barcelona does not work necessarily in Oslo does not work necessarily Milano does not work necessarily in Brussels does not work necessarily in berlin okay so every city might have their own characteristics and the interesting thing here is to recognize the existence of different types of models in a case what we have done is basically i will not have time of course to get into the details of the project but we have developed a strategies in five main domains we have done we have designed policies in the field of planning and admission policies what so what type what type of strategies local educational authorities can use to plan better the supply of schools let's let's think for instance about how to redesign catchment areas it's a very important issue okay or how to or whether you give more points to families when they have to choose if they have less at income okay or whether you change the proximity priorities in the school access process all these type of decisions are very micro decisions that are very important so we have developed strategies which again are context-based to understand planning and admission policies the second group of policies that we have analyzed and or where we have tried to develop good practices it's the identification of vulnerable groups and strategies to balance school and realm and roman this is a policy that is being implemented today for instance in the city of Barcelona and also in some cities in flanders it's very interesting so the question here is how do we identify children that have special learning needs because they have more learning difficulties or whatever and what we try to do is to identify how many of them are in a catchment area in a neighborhood in a territory and we try to balance the proportion of and the representation of these students in different schools so trying to avoid the high level of concentration of vulnerable groups in in a specific in a specific schools there are some interesting projects here that it's it's interesting that if you are interested with that you can check in the website what type of policies the website of course has so many links to which you can actually get access to and and get more information a third chapter of policies refers to information policies that local education authorities can give to families probably you are aware that the question of information is very crucial in terms of understanding inequality in a school choice and a school segregation we know that there are some families that are extremely active in the market in terms of gathering information checking school websites visiting schools and so on others actually do much less or just choose the school that is closest to to their house but these are not the only differences local education authorities can do much more in terms of how to provide the information that can help the educational demand behave in a different way for instance middle-class families sometimes are very reluctant to choose specific schools the local educational authorities can play a role to help middle-class families to prevent what white flight and to maintain them in the territory that's very important or some migrant families or ethnic minorities tend to choose the schools like with that that are chosen by by people like them this is very common and very normal that happens so sometimes the administrations the local educational authorities can actually help to change this by actually inviting families to choose with more to to widen the choice set of this type of of of families okay so there are many strategies here that you can also gather information about what to do and how to do it the fourth the fourth pillar is refers to compensatory policies for socially disadvantaged students and schools that's very important that we we keep in mind a double strategy when we talk about the school segregation on the one hand all the policies that I refer before have to do with how to prevent the reproduction of a school segregation how I can plan better the educational supply how can I identify groups and balance their distribution but then I have schools that had already segregated they are already isolated so how do I develop compensatory policies for socially disadvantaged students and schools that are there so here we have examples like the magnet schools projects that started in the us and now it's being spread in more european cities magnet schools are schools that are usually socially low income socially with with many social difficulties and the school actually specializes in some aspects such as arts science music whatever a specialty that actually makes the school is particularly attractive for those children that already go and the idea is also that it makes a difference for attracting also other types of families that usually don't go to those schools so this type of strategies at the school level or at the individual level are the ones that are explored here and the final policy dimension which is also very important refers to new systems of governance we think that one of the main problems of school segregation is that there is lack of dialogue that is lack of common decisions that is lack of incumbents of interest from different sides of the of the educational community and the idea of developing new systems of governance new systems of decision making new systems also of organizing the school system in terms of teacher allocation policies for instance can be very interesting and to innovate and to uh and to go one step forward in tackling school segregation so these are the main policy dimensions that you can check we have produced also in the in the outcomes of ecas a catalog of indicators course materials and policy instruments that you can check in the websites which are addressed to policy makers teachers and stakeholders european guidelines more for policy makers and also educational stakeholders we also have developed strategies to face covid effects because all the project of course happened in the middle of the covid crisis and we were really interested in helping segregated neighborhoods and schools on that and finally also information strategies that that local governments can can develop i didn't put here i can see now the the link but if you go to ecas.eu you can easily check the sorry i will stop this here and i probably will be able to see you all you can easily check in the website ecas.eu all all these aspects and you can and you can actually well one of the things i can do is also to share with you the the website let me just show it to you and it will be easier okay this is the website of the project you have a manual in that part okay you have of course the description of the ecas project and sorry about this i put it the the existence of the the the training materials that we have we have different modules to understand what is the school situation what causes the school situation and especially the model this one what can be done is where you can find different types of strategies in the five policy fields that i i i mentioned it i just mentioned but here as you can see you can have examples about all these areas school supply and mission policies information policies and if you just get into the website you can have first an explanation of what what is doing a school supply to tackle school situation and then also a number of initiatives that are mostly from the three cities and occasionally from other cities in which you can actually use different tools it's like a menu in which you can you can learn and you can actually think about whether these tools can be useful for for developing policies at your school or city level okay i will stop here i think because i think i use already 45 minutes almost and i think it would be time for any questions comments you might like to to make on this thank you so much thank you very much so we have already some questions in the chat okay the first one was before you start presenting the ICAS project we have a comment here how we can ensure that the segregation mechanisms want to cure and how can we ensure that the distribution of pupils is not affected by the differences you mentioned which are the main cause of discrimination yeah yeah it's a very important and very difficult question to answer of course one of the things that you can check if you go into the links of these game that i presented is that it's with the shelling model it's very clear that segregation is very easily reproduced because if we really start thinking suspiciously about the quality of summer schools or i'm talking with my neighborhoods and they are choosing a school which is not the neighborhood school and so on that reproduces this chain of decision makings these micro decisions that end up producing a macro behavior which is uh which is uh much more much more complex than than than the sum of individual decisions but the shelling model also shows that once we have a segregated territory or segregated city it's much more difficult to go back to desegregate because then the the level of of even if i move the levels of tolerance to very low levels since the city is already very segregated it's very difficult to change the mobility of people so it's very important to understand that that we have to be very active when we perceive the risks of segregation okay of course when we have very segregated highly segregated territories we have to intervene to compensate that but sometimes we are witnessing processes of segregation that can be prevented or can be stopped with more active policies and of course one of the main questions and i think the the second question we're regarding this is how do we understand the mechanisms of discrimination how it works it's very important that uh the the public authorities defend the rights to education and the social rights and economic rights of all the minorities otherwise uh this produces immediately processes of stratification in the attitude and the minds of the citizens it is i i always complain when sometimes there's people that interprets that the school segregation has to do with the attitudes of of the people of the middle class i think it's very it's very unfair to say that because in many of course there might be some racist attitudes or some highly discriminatory attitudes always happens in societies but in many occasions the decisions that have to do with segregation come from families that might say i am uh willing to take my child to that school if it really represented the average of ethnic minority groups that we have in the neighborhood but the problem is that this school has 80 percent not 35 percent and that's what actually prevents that those families to make the decision so it's uh we can expect from the attitudes but we have to generate the conditions for the change of these attitudes too and i think i think the support from the authorities is important when it comes to these topics absolutely and then we had another comments last question uh concerning the Milan slide uh if um are you basically telling us that this issue has been better dealt uh in Spain and uh in Paris and what this is this telling us yeah no i'm just just showing different types of models there's there's no perfect model here of course um having for instance if you have a very like Milan or Barcelona we just southern european cities that do not have especially high levels of residential segregation if you have systems of catchment area like Milano which actually favors access to private to to local schools um that would be a system that would be good for reducing the school segregation what's the problem in Milano that they have such high level of school choice system and they have high levels of uh oversupply of school places that there is always a way out okay one of the things that explains the school segregation is whether families sometimes have uh possibilities of going of flying of going out and if you don't give them these possibilities they might be much more designated to make some choices in the area designated and it's not such a bad choice because there's one important thing that i didn't have to go through but when we talk about the school segregation and the social consequences of segregation we always have in mind this fear that uh especially middle and upper classes might have oh if my child mixes with a child that is lower class or is from a micro background that will prevent the learning process of my child well what we know from the research is that this is not true in most cases children that are from middle and upper classes no doesn't matter if they are mixed with more migrant or less migrant students because the social origin of the family explains very much the performance while on the other hand it makes a complete high difference for migrant students and for lower income students because there is what we call the peer effects peer effects are very important uh that means that the learning of the child of children change in depending on the type of peers the type of colleagues that they have around them if you have high levels of children with lots of difficulties for learning lots of difficulties for even understanding the language of instruction of the class or whatever that makes a complete difference okay so i'm not saying that barcelona is a better model than milano on the other way around i think all mothers have the institutional history it's very important to understand for instance in barcelona it's very important to understand the high presence of private schools are private subsidized schools but integrated mostly within the public system but at the same time they are different and produce differences and we have a controlled system i can i can make this critique very clearly we have a controlled choice system which is not controlled enough because we have always systems of of of going out as we can see with with 33 percent of families actually opting out of the school of the neighborhood school well thank you very much for your comments um if there aren't any other questions i i have one okay you presented us three different models let's say one from lan and barcelona and oslo and do you think that the model of oslo with the regional model let's say that children go to specific schools based on where they live what do you think that such a model would help solve this yeah i think there's many positive things about the norwegian model and the oslo model i think there's in norway i don't know whether these people from norway that of course will know much better than i hear uh what i'm going to tell you but what i see is that they value very much the the question of the community and it's very important for them also that children even when they are young they are able to go to school on their own so it's very important that distance and it's very logical it is they give a lot of value to go to a school close to the home okay if you have a system that works like this and as a typical scandinavian society you have a more or less balanced neighborhoods with the quality of living standards that are similar that one could think that this is the perfect model but i've been working with colleagues from oslo for the last three years and i have seen the challenges of some high levels of residential segregation especially of refugee children so they have some areas with 30 percent or 35 percent of refugee children in those areas and then of course since there is no mobility and nobody would think about buzzing or about changing the location of of of refugee children to other schools they they have high levels of concentration of of schools of of these types of children in summer schools so they they also have problems with that they also have significant problems of course if you have high levels of residential segregation at some point this system it's not the best and then you have also to find interesting ways of of dealing with this it is also the case and it's very important to keep in mind that even cities within cities we have high levels of interagency and what it can work in a district might not be the same things that work in another district so we have also to be flexible and adaptable to to to make decisions in this context so once again we see how the overall system of the community or the country affects education also yeah so we maybe we can sum up that do you have something to say to sum up yes i think that yeah there's of course this is we are talking for one hour about a topic that is very complex and but i think it is important to keep this message that of course there are many external causes of what produces school segregation but there are also many internal aspects that are in the field of education policies so in the way there's two messages here one thing is that it's very important to work together with urban development policies with social policies and so on and at the same time it's very important that we develop the instruments to work better from within the education system making laws that are more equity driven that developing reforms in the school system school admission systems that are more equity driven the same with planning strategies with information policies so we have a number of tools that can be used and we and we learn and we know that in some cases they have an effect Barcelona has currently a shop plan against school segregation being implemented from 2019 and we know that after four years school segregation in in primary education have reduced between 16 and 23 percent depending on the territories so there are strategies that can be implemented and can help little by little to have cities more equitable and more more in favor of the of the right to education great thank you very much thank you and since we have no other questions or comments in the chat we we can end this webinar here thank you again for being here with us and explain us this not difficult issue exactly but complex as you said something complex and segregation is a complex term that has a lot of components let's say so thank you very much thank you thank you everyone thank you this was our last webinar for the summer we will see you all again in September thank you very much for being here enjoy your summer your vacation and take some good rest thank you bye bye