Multi-collège catchment areas in Paris: an effective tool for combating social segregation?

Julien Grenet (1, 2, 3) , Youssef Souidi (1, 2, 3)

1 PSE - Paris School of Economics
2 PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques
3 IPP - Institut des politiques publiques

Collèges (middle schools) in Paris have some of the highest levels of social segregation in France due to wide social contrasts between geographically close neighbourhoods and to a large number of pupils from the most privileged backgrounds attending private schools. Because of this, the Council of Paris voted in January 2017 to create three two-collège catchment areas in the 18th and 19th arrondissements. The scheme consisted of defining joint catchment areas (secteurs) for several middle schools in order to make their intakes socially more diverse. The provisional results for the first year of the experiment (2017-2018) are encouraging. Two of the three catchment areas achieved their objective of greater social diversity and also reduced the number of pupils enrolling in private schools. Although in the short term the social composition of the schools in the third catchment area was not rebalanced by the scheme, from the results of the assessment we can identify several ways to improve this.

Domaines: Economies et finances

Julien Grenet, Youssef Souidi. Multi-collège catchment areas in Paris: an effective tool for combating social segregation?. 2018. ⟨halshs-02520801⟩