This study contributes to the research on ethnic educational inequality, by deepening the current understanding of education initiatives organised by the ethnic-cultural minoritised communities most affected by these inequalities. A univariate analysis was performed on data from an original survey conducted in Flanders, in which 816 teachers and…

Supplementary schooling can play an important role in the educational trajectory of minoritised youth. Yet, our knowledge of the communities' motives for organising education and the purposes the schools pursue remains limited. Existing literature tends to understand supplementary schools either as resisting ongoing inequity in mainstream society…

Despite the group of Newly Arrived Migrant Students (NAMS) being very diverse, their educational outcomes are homogeneous and rather weak in many countries. In Flanders (Belgium) the educational trajectory of NAMS starts in a separate program that prepares them for their transition to regular secondary education. Rather than seeing the outcomes of…

This paper presents a sociologically informed analysis of the historically changing relation between education and society. Using a set of socio-geographical methods and longitudinal data from population censuses, we explore changes in the forms of educational inclusion and exclusion in the period 1961 to 2011. We analyse, more particularly,…

The move to include students with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream education is one of the priorities of educational reform agendas in many countries. Also in Flanders (Belgium) the government's aim is to implement a more inclusive school system, but this faces some resistance from practitioners. This study examines the way in which…

This article highlights the inequality in the Flemish education system, which disproportionately affects youngsters with low socioeconomic status. This inequality is attributed to the human capital approach characterising current educational policies, putting emphasis on educational outcomes. This results in education that homogenises and limits…

This study offers a comparative examination of desegregation policy reforms in Belgium, Chile, and the Netherlands, addressing equity reforms to universal school choice systems. Through an analysis of the reform trajectories, we explore the evolution of policies, the causal mechanisms of change, efforts to institutionalize policies, and the…

Although the importance of developing students' academic literacies has been well-established, academic oracy has been forgotten. There is a paucity of attention to oracy in higher education, despite the key role played by students' oral communication in academic achievement and graduate employability. This study offers a scoping review of the…

It is commonly known that education reproduces, rather than diminishes, social inequality, but how this takes place may vary between educational systems. This paper uses data from a unique longitudinal cross-national project to analyze differences in pathways through the upper years of secondary education between Bergen (Norway), Ghent (Flanders,…

Previous research shows that the lockdown of schools due to the COVID-19 pandemic increased the already existing inequalities in education but little is known about the processes underlying these outcomes. In this study we used Bourdieu's theories to explore how interactions between teachers' expectations of parents and parents' availability of…

This study investigated trajectories of ethnic discrimination experiences in school, diversity climates as contextual antecedents, and school adjustment as outcome. Latent-Growth-Mixture-Models of repeated self-reported discrimination over 3 years (2012-2015) by 1445 ethnically-minoritized adolescents of Turkish and Moroccan background in 70…

This article examines how different civic learning opportunities relate to students' political knowledge in different school tracks. Existing studies have found that citizenship teaching can not only enhance overall levels of civic outcomes but also mitigate inequalities. However, educational achievement studies emphasize the risk of a tracked…

Although schools with a high concentration of ethnic minorities often underperform, not much is known about the factors that predict high and even excellent achievement of pupils within these schools. Therefore, we examined which concrete diversity practices and key psychological processes increase or decrease the likelihood/odds for high and…

Educational research acknowledges the significant challenges faced by racialized minority students at school. This interview-based study examines the experiences of racialized minority students in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region in Belgium, regarding a social science curriculum that addresses the power dynamics and privilege involved in…

In the sociology of education, opponents of deficit thinking would be seen as important change agents, potentially inspiring radical policy change aimed at reducing systemic discrimination of specific sociodemographic groups. That is, contestation of deficit thinking can in theory lead to its destruction. In this paper, we argue that contestation…