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This article analyzes the intergenerational correlation of employment between young women (at about 30 years of age) and their mothers (when their daughters were about 14 years old), using 2011 European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions data. It examines the extent to which this correlation varies across 19 European countries and is associated with the socioeconomic context at the national level. Having grown up with a working mother is associated with a sizeable increase in the daughters' employment probability in almost all countries, with greater effect for women with children. For this group, the intergenerational correlation is smaller in countries where the policy context is less favorable to maternal employment. It is crucial to promote gender equality, challenging individuals' gender stereotypes through education and in society at large, and create conditions that allow young women's preferences for work to be realized, enhancing policies that favor a balanced sharing of unpaid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational expansion has been taking place in European countries since 2000. We address the relationship between this educational expansion and the inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) by educational origin. We analyse the European Social Survey data from 20 European countries over five rounds (2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018). Our analysis is restricted to the 25–34 age groups. We use a multilevel sequential logit (MLSL) model for three hierarchical educational transitions (sequences), delimited by four International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED97) categories. We apply the MLSL model to decompose IEO in completed education into the educational origin effects on passing transitions and the structural effects (weights) connected with transitions. Our results show that educational expansion slightly weakens IEO in completed education, but this is far from being a situation in which IEO does not exist. IEO is maintained in educational transitions by transitional inequality offset. The effect of the weight of each transition takes over the educational origin effect on passing transitions and vice versa over educational expansion. Both these effects are maintained in balance; educational expansion changes primarily their ratio. This holds true until one of the transitions becomes mostly universal. After that, its contribution (weighted origin effect) to IEO in completed education begins to diminish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter shows, from a comprehensive and dynamic approach, a unitary idea of Europe that shatters the fragmentation and reification of the old continent that is being politically projected. The research, based on a brief overview of the geopolitical and territorial diversity of the Western European countries, recovers the cartographic representation of Europe made by Sebastian Münster in 1544. It aims to represent a renewed area that has strengthened its international presence, based on the legitimization of divergent trajectories explained through interactive logics. The political agenda for socio-educational issues portrays the contextual diversity that rules the governance of the Western European education systems. At the same time, it shows unification regarding inclusive institutional paradigms where the most significant achievements are accomplished within the European strategic framework. The research allows us to move on from the nationalist–post-nationalist option. Part of the European scene from which present and future lines of joint action are extracted in relation to sustainability, economic digitization and/or reformulation of the social system model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Española de Sociología is the property of Federacion Espanola de Sociologia and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study provides comparable lower-bound estimates of inequality of opportunity for tertiary education (EIOp) for 31 countries in Europe, by using the two EU-SILC waves for which information on family background is available (2005 and 2011). The results reveal an important degree of heterogeneity, with Northern European countries showing low levels of inequality of opportunity and Mediterranean and Eastern European countries characterized by significant degrees of unfair educational inequalities. Parental education and occupation are the most relevant circumstances in the great majority of the countries considered. This study also exploits the two point-in-time observations available and analyses the relationship between some country-specific characteristics and inequality of opportunity in tertiary education. The analysis documents a negative association between EIOp and real GDP per capita, possibly indicating that higher equality of opportunity in tertiary education and economic growth are complementary objectives. Two results emerge as especially robust: in all the specifications we find a positive association between EIOp and the students/teacher ratio, and a negative one between EIOp and public spending in tertiary education. While we do not claim that such correlations should be interpreted causally, we think that they might indicate a meaningful underlying relationship between equality of opportunity in tertiary education and the availability of financial and non-financial resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the status quo of fairness in Europe? To answer this question, we have calculated multidimensional equality of opportunity in income, education, and health for 29 European countries in 2019. Our results show that inequalities of opportunity in education and health are lower than in income. Furthermore, inequality of opportunity measures for these outcome dimensions are imperfectly correlated. This pattern has important implications for fairness comparisons across European countries. While the Scandinavian countries still emerge as the places with the most leveled playing field, the opportunity gap between Northern Europe and Southern Europe is much reduced when jointly considering income, education, and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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, Belgium) and Barcelona (Spain). Analyses show that social background has the greatest impact on destination in both Years 11 and 12 of upper secondary education, and engagement does not mediate this relationship. Further, we find more commonalities than differences between the cities, despite them representing different types of educational systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective Using a novel mediation method that presents unbiased results even in the presence of exposure-mediator interactions, this study estimated the extent to which working conditions and health behaviors contribute to educational inequalities in self-rated health in the workforce. Methods Respondents of the longitudinal Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) in 16 countries were selected, aged 50-64 years, in paid employment at baseline and with information on education and self-rated health (N=15 028). Education, health behaviors [including body mass index (BMI)] and working conditions were measured at baseline and self-rated health at baseline and two-year follow-up. Causal mediation analysis with inverse odds weighting was used to estimate the total effect of education on self-rated health, decomposed into a natural direct effect (NDE) and natural indirect effect (NIE). Results Lower educated workers were more likely to perceive their health as poor than higher educated workers [relative risk (RR) 1.48, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.37-1.60]. They were also more likely to have unfavorable working conditions and unhealthy behaviors, except for alcohol consumption. When all working conditions were included, the remaining NDE was RR 1.30 (95% CI 1.15-1.44). When BMI and health behaviors were included, the remaining NDE was RR 1.40 (95% CI 1.27-1.54). Working conditions explained 38% and health behaviors and BMI explained 16% of educational inequalities in health. Including all mediators explained 64% of educational inequalities in self-rated health. Conclusions Working conditions and health behaviors explain over half of the educational inequalities in selfrated health. To reduce health inequalities, improving working conditions seems to be more important than introducing health promotion programs in the workforce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research suggests that the fertility-education relationship may be mediated by the educational attainment of the partner, especially among the tertiary-educated. However, there are no studies focusing on the couple-education-fertility nexus among couples who achieved only basic educational attainment, even though resource pooling theory predicts differences in family formation by couples' joint levels of socio-economic resources. We address this research gap and investigate how educational pairings among married and cohabiting partners relate to second and third birth transitions across 22 European countries, using data from the EU-SILC (European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions) panel and discrete time event history models. Our findings show significantly lower second and third birth transition rates among homogamous low-educated couples compared to heterogamous couples with one low- and one medium or highly-educated partner in the Nordic countries, but not across the rest of Europe. However, couples with one or two low-educated partners have significantly lower second birth rates compared with couples with two highly-educated partners in all European regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Comparative Education / Revista Española de Educación Comparada is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Spanish Journal of Comparative Education / Revista Española de Educación Comparada is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Health expectancies are widely used by policymakers and scholars to analyse the number of years a person can expect to live in good health. Their calculation requires life tables in combination with prevalence rates of good or bad health from survey data. The structure of typical survey data, however, rarely resembles the education distribution in the general population. Specifically, low-educated individuals are frequently underrepresented in surveys, which is crucial given the strong positive correlation between educational attainment and good health. This is the first study to evaluate if and how health expectancies for 13 European countries are biased by educational differences in survey participation. To this end, calibrated weights that consider the education structure in the 2011 censuses are applied to measures of activity limitation in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe. The results show that health expectancies at age 50 are substantially biased by an average of 0.3 years when the education distribution in the general population is ignored. For most countries, health expectancies are overestimated; yet remarkably, the measure underestimates health for many Central and Eastern European countries by up to 0.9 years. These findings highlight the need to adjust for distortion in health expectancies, especially when the measure serves as a base for health-related policy targets or policy changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Levels of social segregation within education systems differ between countries. • Social segregation between schools correlates with social disparities in student achievement. • Segregation is not associated with average levels of student achievement. • Socio-spatial separation of students contributes to some extent to educational inequality. Given recent evidence of rising levels of social segregation in European countries, this study uses standardized data from the Program for International Student Assessment (n = 171,159; 50.5% male) to examine the extent to which education systems in Europe are socially segregated and whether social segregation in the school system affects achievement gaps between students of different social origin. Results suggest that the degree of social segregation within education systems varied substantially across countries. Furthermore, multilevel regression models indicate that the effect of socioeconomic status on student achievement was moderately but significantly stronger in more segregated education systems, even after controlling for alternative system-level determinants of social inequality in student achievement. These findings provide original evidence that social segregation in education systems may contribute to the intergenerational transmission of educational (dis)advantage and thus serve to exacerbate wider problems of socioeconomic inequality in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I draw on the findings of a recently completed comparative research project to address the question: how did intergenerational social mobility change over cohorts of men and women born in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, and what role, if any, did education play in this? The countries studied are the US, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Notwithstanding the differences between them, by and large they present the same picture. Rates of upward mobility increased among cohorts born in the second quarter of the century and then declined among those born later. Among earlier born cohorts, social fluidity increased (that is, the association between the class a person was born into and the class he or she came to occupy as an adult declined) and then remained unchanged for those born after mid-century. The association between class origins and educational attainment followed much the same trend as social fluidity. This suggests that growing equalization in education may have contributed to the increase in social fluidity. In our analyses we find that this is so, but educational expansion also led to greater fluidity in some countries. There is also a strong link between upward mobility and social fluidity. Upward mobility was mostly driven by the expansion of higher-level white-collar jobs, especially in the 30 years after the end of the Second World War. This facilitated social fluidity because people from working class and farming origins could move into the service or salariat classes without reducing the rate at which children born into those classes could remain there. Educational expansion, educational equalization, and rapid structural change in the economies of the US and Europe all contributed to greater social fluidity among people born in the second quarter of the twentieth century. For people born after mid-century, rates of downward mobility have increased: however, despite the lack of further educational equalization and less pronounced structural change, social fluidity has remained unchanged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Education Policy Analysis Archives / Archivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas / Arquivos Analíticos de Políticas Educativas is the property of Educational Policy Analysis Archives & Education Review and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of GENDER: Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft is the property of Verlag Barbara Budrich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The links between tracked secondary schooling and social selection form part of a complex narrative regarding educational inequality in European schools. The relative contribution of family and school to unequal educational outcomes has dominated educational debates across the continent for more than 50 years. This article contributes to this debate by focusing on a sample of students in the final year of schooling in three schools in northern Italy. It asks whether there are social differences in enrolments and aspirations across the three different types of schools. It also considers whether aspirations can be linked to differences in levels of family support or to school-related factors. To examine these links, we consider four main ways of conceptualising aspirations and propose an approach that draws on theories explaining preference formation and choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research into educational inequalities has shown the importance of decomposing social origins into parental class, status and education, representing economic, socio-cultural and educational family resources, respectively. But we know little about how inequalities in educational attainment at the micro-level map onto institutional characteristics of educational systems at the macro-level, if we treat social origins in a multidimensional way. Drawing on the rich over-time variation in educational systems in four European countries – Britain, Sweden, Germany and Italy – this paper develops and tests a number of hypotheses regarding the effects of various components of social origins on individuals’ educational attainment in different institutional contexts. It is evident from our results that a great deal of similarity exists across nations with different educational systems in the persisting importance for individuals’ educational attainment of parental class, status and education. But our findings also indicate that changes in the institutional features of educational systems have, in some instances although not in others, served to reinforce or to offset the social processes generating educational inequalities at the micro level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article assesses trends over time in the influence of social origins on educational attainment in 26 European countries. We use a cumulative dataset that merges the European Social Survey (waves 2002–2010), the International Social Survey Programme (1999, 2009) and the European Value Study (2008). Our contribution to the literature is threefold. First, we replicate as closely as possible the previous study by Breen et al. [(2009) ‘Nonpersistent in educational attainment: Evidence from eight European countries’,American Journal of Sociology114: 1475–1521] and extend it to a larger set of countries and to more recent cohorts. Second, we reassess the argument that equalization does not involve Higher Education. Third, we consider whether our conclusions change if we use a more comprehensive measurement of social origins that jointly incorporates indicators of social class, social status and parental education. We detect a generalized reduction of educational inequalities in the post-war decades. When we focus on Higher Education, we still detect evidence of equalization, although to a lower extent. Our analyses do not support the claim that, when using a more comprehensive treatment of social origins, the patterns for different indicators evolve in opposite directions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a self-reflection of my work over a decade of challenging school segregation of Roma across Europe. I look at how segregation has been framed and how communication around equality in education with the public took place. The education system is an important pillar in producing and reproducing antigypsyism in society. I see school segregation as an important mechanism that perpetuates antigypsyism. I explore ways to attract support for equality measures in education. One important strategy is to engage with media in transmitting messages to an audience that was usually not the target of inclusive discourses that promote diversity and equality as societal values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the reversal of the gender gap in education, the female partner in a couple now typically has as much as or more education compared with the male partner in most Western countries. This study addresses the implications for the earnings of women relative to their male partners in 16 European countries. Using the 2007 and 2011 rounds of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (N = 58,292), we investigate the extent to which international differences in women's relative earnings can be explained by educational pairings and their interaction with the motherhood penalty on women's earnings, by international differences in male unemployment, or by cultural gender norms. We find that the newly emerged pattern of hypogamy is associated with higher relative earnings for women in all countries and that the motherhood penalty on relative earnings is considerably lower in hypogamous couples, but neither of these findings can explain away international country differences. Similarly, male unemployment is associated with higher relative earnings for women but cannot explain away the country differences. Against expectations, we find that the hypogamy bonus on women's relative earnings, if anything, tends to be stronger rather than weaker in countries that exhibit more conservative gender norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND In modern, highly developed countries the association between education and fertility seems to be equivocal: A negative influence of education mainly applies to women, while among men the correlation is often positive or negligible. Although the gender differences have been examined in depth, couples' procreative behaviour treated as the result of a conflict between male and female characteristics is still understudied. OBJECTIVE This study aims to investigate couples' reproductive behaviour among contemporary European populations with regard to (in)equality between partners' educational levels and the joint educational resources of a couple. Various measures of educational endogamy are considered. METHODS The hurdle zero-truncated Poisson model within the Bayesian framework is applied. The data comes from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey for Austria, Bulgaria, and France. RESULTS Homogamous low-educated partners have, on average, the highest fertility. The highly educated postpone childbearing and have a smaller number of children in all countries except France, where their completed fertility does not differ from that of other unions. The effect of hypergamy is insignificant and is thus similar to homogamy in medium education. Hypogamy negatively influences fertility in Bulgaria and Austria, while in France the effect is insignificant. CONCLUSIONS The small variation in fertility due to couple-level education observed in France indicates that proper institutional support for families might help couples overcome possible obstacles and enhance fertility for all educational profiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine the factors that are associated with the probability for a student to be retained in primary school; understanding such phenomenon is very important, because the literature points at claiming that retention perpetrates socioeconomic and educational inequality, instead of reducing it. Empirically, we estimate a multivariate logistic regression with the aim of identifying cross-country determinants of grade retention using data about 16 European countries participating in PIRLS 2011 using data about entry age at school and grade enrollment to identify retained students. Our results highlight that socioeconomic background is not the only factor that plays a role. Early-acquired skills do reduce the probability for a child to become a repeater; thus, the policy-makers should devote their effort in helping families to undertake preschool activities that develop skills also before starting formal schooling. Later assistance with homework is helpful as well, but with a lower magnitude and effect, which is offset if early skills are properly accounted for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economics of Agriculture / Ekonomika Poljoprivrede is the property of Institute of Agricultural Economics (IAE) / Belgrade and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For decades, reforms aiming at educational expansion attempted to boost economic growth and to reduce inequalities. This study sheds light on the link between institutional settings of the education system and educational inequalities in the course of educational expansion along two axes of inequality: social origin and gender. Looking at the educational attainment of cohorts born between 1925 and 1982 in the European Social Survey data, changing patterns of inequalities are analysed regarding four distinct education systems - England (UK), Finland, Luxembourg, and (Germanspeaking) Switzerland. Employing a comparative perspective, characteristics of the educational system that influence the societal change of educational levels and educational inequalities are considered. Our results show that although the patterns of educational inequalities were comparable in all four countries, Finland seems to have been the most successful in reducing educational inequalities if looking at both inequalities related to social origins and gender at the same time. However, in regard to social inequalities Switzerland also performs well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paralleling the global epidemic of obesity figures in the general population, the incidence of maternal obesity (BMI>30kg/m(2) at the start of pregnancy) has been rising over the last world. While most European countries do not systematically report obesity figures in their pregnant population, the prevalence of maternal obesity varies from 7 to 25% and seems strongly related to social and educational inequalities. Obesity during pregnancy represents an important preventable risk factor for adverse pregnancy outcomes and is associated with negative long-term health outcomes for both mothers and offspring. These effects are often aggravated by the high incidence of abnormal glucose tolerance and excessive gestational weight gain found in this group. The main controversies around the management of the obese pregnant women are related to (1) the value of repeated weighing during pregnancy, (2) the optimal gestational weight gain to advise and the lifestyle messages to deliver in order to achieve this, (3) the optimal strategy and timing of screening for gestational diabetes (GDM) and (4) the optimal timing and mode of delivery. These controversies are reviewed in this review, with the exception of screening for gestational diabetes that is discussed extensively elsewhere in this issue (Benhalima et al.). An agenda for research is proposed with the hope that it will catch the attention of policy-makers and funders and ultimately lead to the development of European-wide evidence-based guidelines for clinicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rise in maternal employment in Europe between 1970 and the 2000s, women's labour market positions continue to depend much more strongly on family formation than those of men. The available literature on educational gradients in maternal employment is largely based on cross-sectional comparisons. This study is among the first to decompose educational differences in maternal employment into differences prior to motherhood and differential effects of childbearing on employment. Drawing on longitudinal microdata (Generations and Gender Survey) for France, the Netherlands, and Hungary, participation in the labour force is studied using mixed effects logit models. In addition we distinguish part-time and full-time work. In line with the available literature, clear positive educational gradients in maternal employment are found, largely reflecting positive educational differentials already existing before family formation. This finding is related to the fact that highly educated women typically aim to establish a career before starting a family, but also have better labour market opportunities in general. Temporary drops in labour force participation are larger after a first birth among highly educated women. Part-time working of mothers is less strongly determined by employment before the first birth, and its frequency increases with educational level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This small-scale, highly original study connects themes which are rarely explored in relation to each other, particularly in a European context: vocational education and training (VET), refugees and race equality in order to explore how VET policies impact on racial equality, and the ways racial structures in Europe impact on VET. It begins to fill important gaps in cross-European research, firstly around VET and race, and secondly around refugees and VET. The paper is based on a study which examined the meso-social benefits of, and barriers to VET for adult refugees to European countries, commissioned by CEDEFOP, the agency funded by the European Commission to promote the development of VET in the European Union. In the paper, we argue that a key factor in shaping refugees’ experiences of VET, are the racial structures integral to capitalist societies. Innovatively drawing on key literature which analyses white privilege in the labour market to contextualise our findings, we suggest that barriers faced by refugees are potentially related to structures of white privilege which shape notions of work and workers in Europe and sustain racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing from quantitative and qualitative data collected by the European research project GOETE in eight European countries, the article focuses on the experiences of so-called “disadvantaged students” at the end of lower secondary and analyzes how access to higher education is negotiated in the interaction of structural/institutional frameworks and student agency. After elaborating an intersectional framework on disadvantage, the article showcases that access to higher education is defined by national schooling regulations, but also by educational professionals’ discourses and by students’ attitudes. Through professional discourses, representations, and normative expectations, students are differentiated and hierarchized according to class, ethnicity, and gender. In the schools investigated, located in deprived areas, students experience these differentiations through stigmatization or discrimination, and build different types of agency in their life contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the role of school staff in the accessibility of education with a focus on professional discretion and its relation with institutions and contexts. Drawing on the street-level bureaucracy approach it looks into different types of discretionary practices and asks how their legitimacy influences their success. The analysis is based on different types of data and exemplary trajectories are used as illustration. Results show that discretion can be used to both increase and reduce accessibility: proactivity is elicited when societal goals are shared, but means are considered inadequate and when control over the process is high. Negative reactivity is associated with overworking and silo professional cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article institutional and structural factors relating to access to education are assessed. First, the macro frameworks of institutional regulation that exert influence on the educational trajectories of young Europeans are demonstrated. Based on different aspects of these frameworks and drawing from extant research, the article presents a typology of education systems that provide varying levels of access to and accessibility of education in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom. Second, using survey data (N = 6,366) it analyzes the impact of gender and parental education on young people’s educational aspirations and early labor-market entry across the countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on different ways in which socially disadvantaged parents engage with their children’s educational experiences, and provides evidence of the role they play in opening or narrowing their children’s access to education. Disadvantaged parents are usually associated with weak or difficult educational trajectories for their children, because of their lower level of economic, cultural, and social capital. Nevertheless, this association does not operate as an automatic mechanism. Indeed, against a backdrop of persisting inequalities, research data show a plurality of intraclass and intragroup dynamics, with disadvantaged parents having diverse ways of avoiding blaming processes, saving dignity, and acting as proactive agents for their children’s educational career. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents analytical considerations for the discussion of issues of access to education and inequality. It first sharpens the concept of access and inequality by pointing to the interplay of structure and agency as well as to processes of social differentiation in which differences are constructed. This implies a critical view on “access” not as something that is simply given in educational systems or as something students “have.” Referring to interactional and intersectional considerations, the more comprehensive concept of “accessibility” is suggested, which points to the process of making education accessible. Second, the chapter distinguishes and discusses four levels of analysis to be considered, while providing a review of the existing research and putting into context the research findings of the European research project GOETE. In the concluding section, accessibility is discussed as requiring a multidimensional and multidisciplinary theoretical approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an introduction in which the editors discuss articles on topics related to access to education in Europe, including educational inequality, institutional frameworks related to educational accessibility, and socially disadvantaged parents' engagement with education.

The changes that have occurred in the field of education over the course of the last couple of decades have been associated with increased demands that are not only placed on individuals from both within and beyond the education system, but also on the support they require to make successful educational choices. One central way this need is being addressed is through educational and vocational guidance provided at different stages and transition points of educational trajectories. The aim of this article is to provide a context for the research findings presented in the subsequent articles of this special issue by illustrating the ways educational trajectories are regulated through the organization of schooling and the structures of educational and vocational guidance in the eight countries that participated in the Governance of Educational Trajectories in Europe (GOETE) research project. This article presents three country clusters of education and welfare based on the comparative analysis conducted by the project. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides evidence on the sources of differences in inequality in educational scores and their evolution over time in four European countries. Using Programme for International Student Assessment data from the 2000 and the 2006 waves, the paper shows that inequality decreased in Germany and Spain (two ‘decentralised’ schooling systems), whilst it increased in France and Italy (two ‘centralised’ systems). The decomposition exercise shows that educational inequality not only does reflect the background related inequality, but also schools' characteristics especially. These characteristics are responsible for the observed evolution over time of inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of European Early Childhood Education Research Journal is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of European Early Childhood Education Research Journal is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we revisit the relationship between educational and income inequalities in a historical perspective, using a newly developed annual dataset of average years of education in Europe. Theoretically one would expect a reduction in educational inequality should, given the positive correlation between education level and income, initially increase and then, at a later stage, reduce income inequality. Testing for such a Kuznets-type relationship between educational and income inequalities yields an unexpected result: we find the expected inverse U-curve before the 1950s, but the relationship changes into a normal U-curve afterward. We explain this observation by a change in the trend of skill premium during the second half of the twentieth century due to an increased relative demand for skills, which contradicts the usual assumption of decreasing returns to education. Due to lack of appropriate wage data, we cannot directly capture this effect. Yet, once we use an instrumental variable estimation method to filter out the effect of the omitted skill premium, the expected inverse U-curve also appears for the latter decades of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Smoking is an important determinant of socioeconomic inequalities in mortality in many countries. As the smoking epidemic progresses, updates on the development of mortality inequalities attributable to smoking are needed. We provide estimates of relative and absolute educational inequalities in mortality from lung cancer, aerodigestive cancers, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)/asthma in Europe and assess the contribution of these smoking-related diseases to inequalities in all-cause mortality. Methods: We use data from 18 European populations covering the time period 1998–2007. We present age-adjusted mortality rates, relative indices of inequality, and slope indices of inequality. We also calculate the contribution of inequalities in smoking-related mortality to inequalities in overall mortality. Results: Among men, relative inequalities in mortality from the 3 smoking-related causes of death combined are largest in the Czech Republic and Hungary and smallest in Spain, Sweden, and Denmark. Among women, these inequalities are largest in Scotland and Norway and smallest in Italy and Spain. They are often larger among men and tend to be larger for COPD/asthma than for lung and aerodigestive cancers. Relative inequalities in mortality from these conditions are often larger in younger age groups, particularly among women, suggesting a possible further widening of inequalities in mortality in the coming decades. The combined contribution of these diseases to inequality in all-cause mortality varies between 13% and 32% among men and between −5% and 30% among women. Conclusion: Our results underline the continuing need for tobacco control policies, which take into account socioeconomic position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The EU needs to address specific measures on children and youngsters with a migrant background in order to achieve the EU 2020 strategy goals on education. These pupils still perform worse than their native peers at school, and their underachievement represents an important obstacle to reach the global challenges. To do so, it is crucial to focus strategic action based on policy implementation and reframe the current status of educational systems into a community, systemic and inclusive approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European societies increasingly implement diversity education as part of citizenship education (CE) curricula in order to provide young people with skills for dealing with diversity. This article analyses the policies and practices of diversity education at both the level of the European Union and the Council of Europe, and on the level of nation states, focusing on Germany and Russia as examples. In Europe, diversity education at schools simultaneously pursues two separate goals: on the one hand, teaching materials and education policies generate a grand narrative of celebrating European diversity. On the other, those same materials and policies stipulate that issues of inequality are to be dealt with separately. Thus, within European citizenship, diversity education and inequalities are often decoupled. Conceptualizing diversity in terms of heterogeneities and inequalities, this article reveals the ways in which diversity and inequalities are decoupled in citizenship and civic education and asks what happens when diversity is treated only as a matter of celebration. Examining blog posts from LGBTQ youth who are minority learners who experience exclusion, the article demonstrates the way in which the narrative of celebration of diversity disempowers them and how it contributes towards more uncertainty and more (self-)exclusion of those learners who do not find themselves within celebration of diversity narratives. The article argues for a reintroduction of the term 'heterogeneities' into CE and concludes by suggesting that diversity education as part of CE should begin with the question of whether there are any heterogeneities that do not require action or critical reflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools and communities may have a key role in reversing the cycle of inequality that the Roma suffer in Europe. Aiming at reducing existing inequalities, dialogic learning aims to ensure high levels of academic learning for all children, by involving the whole community through egalitarian dialogue. Less well known are the implications of this approach for the Roma in highly marginalised areas. This article presents the results of a longitudinal case study in a Spanish primary school, undertaken as part of the European Union-funded INCLUD-ED Integrated Project. It reports on educational actions grounded in dialogic learning, which have succeeded in engaging families and communities in the school, the classroom and other learning spaces. Based on a dialogic school-based transformation, Roma families participated in children’s learning activities and decision-making spaces. We explore how these actions involving Roma families are developed and the effect they may have in improving learning and engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, the degree of choice in education systems has increased in most countries. Still, the variation of choice policies across countries is substantial. The authors ask under what combinations of conditions (i.e. institutional features of education systems) choice policy succeeds in balancing educational efficiency and equity. Using the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, they investigate the impact of seven institutional conditions in 20 European countries. Those seven conditions are identified in school choice literature as relevant in explaining variations in educational efficiency and equity. The analysis shows that there are multiple causal paths to good policy outcome. The main contribution of this article is to show that ‘choice’ is an INUS condition (i.e. an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but sufficient combination of conditions) and that ‘no tracking’ is a necessary condition for educational efficiency and equity. In addition, the authors show that ‘good management’ and ‘competition’ of schools contribute to good educational outcomes only in choice-tolerant countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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