Ethnic Differences in Education and Diverging Prospects for Urban Youth in an Enlarged Europe (EDUMIGROM)

The EDUMIGROM research project has aimed to study how ethnic differences in education contribute to the diverging future prospects of minority ethnic youth and their peers in multiethnic urban settings. It made a departure by recognising that, despite great variations in economic development and welfare arrangements, recent developments seem to lead to similar disadvantages for certain groups of second-generation immigrants in the western half of the continent and Roma in Central Europe. Although formally enjoying social membership with full rights in the respective states, people affiliated with these groups tend to experience new and intensive forms of involuntary separation, marginalisation, social exclusion, and second-class citizenship. By selecting specific communities and schools in the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the project explored how existing educational systems, policies, practices, and experiences in markedly different welfare regimes contribute to these processes of “minoritisation”. Considering that schools are key agents in knowledge distribution and socialisation, the project examined how educational practices in compulsory education conclude in reducing, maintaining, or deepening inequalities in young people’s opportunities for advancement and their access to the labour market, and, concurrently, how they are forging the social contacts, interethnic behaviours, and strategies of identity formation of adolescents from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The results of macro-level investigations, a comparative survey and multi-faceted field research in local settings has provided rich datasets for intra- and cross-country comparisons and evidence-based policy making.

EDUMIGROM EU Policy Brief
EDUMIGROM Poster

EDUMIGROM Summary Findings
EDUMIGROM Final Study