Abstract
This paper investigates the links between the existence of a neighbourhood effect and school choice. The case study is Brussels. It offers the opportunity to analyse a segregated urban context with a school system organized as a quasi-market based on the freedom of school choice. Cross-classified multilevel analyses have been used on 36 427 students in 117 neighbourhoods and 131 schools from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation’s Student count. Our results challenge the idea of local embeddedness in deprived areas. This should be understood in the light of the structural characteristics of the school system (the importance of delays and of early orientations in alternative tracks) but also of the spatial patterns of the school offer in Brussels, which varies according to one’s geographical place in the school system.
Highlights
31 This paper investigates the question of the neighbourhood effect and school choices: do children from deprived neighbourhoods cover smaller distances to go to school? This hypothesis has been tested by using quantitative data in a specific urban area, Brussels
Our results go against the dominant idea of local embeddedness in deprived areas
Future research should tend to link the available data in the Student count dataset to survey collection of individual socioeconomic background or to other administrative data to extract such individual characteristics
Summary
The authors wish to express their gratitude to Andrew Crosby, Rob Kaelen, Sybille Regout and Dirk Jacobs for helpful comments and assistance
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