Social Selection in Education: the Wider Context of the Segregation of Roma Pupils in Hungary

This paper provides an overview of those interacting processes that accelerate the separation of various groups of pupils in education. These interconnected factors construct diverse local patterns of selective school policies. The eight factors that were incorporated to the model are the pressure of societal inequalities, the impact of prevailing pedagogical practice, school structure, parental choices, early performance gaps, the characteristics of school networks, governance failures, and policy expectations. Within the framework of overall social selection in education, the paper analyses the weight of various reasons for the segregation of Roma pupils in Hungary – namely, demographic changes, selective school choice, the impact of recently emerging new school capacities, the underachievement of Roma pupils, the disintegration of the Hungarian school structure, and government policies that are causing a decline in the quality of educational services. Finally, the paper draws attention to certain educational policy dilemmas that stem from the findings of the analysis.