State supported segregation? Examining migrant clustering in schools in Ireland

ABSTRACT

Recent education policy debates in Ireland have focused on whether the dominance of the Catholic Church in primary school provision is an appropriate model for an increasingly diverse population, rather than concern with migrant clustering and/or segregation per se. Efforts to ensure that students from a range of religious or non-religious backgrounds are catered for in education contexts are to be lauded. However, this research provides clear evidence of migrant segregation as a result of how school choice impacts attendance patterns on the ground. This is not surprising, given the evidence from research on school choice which highlights the fact that it can exacerbate socio-economic and demographic segregation. As such, enshrining parental choice as the corner-stone of school provision in Ireland is flawed since it, intentionally or otherwise, builds an educational infrastructure that encourages school segregation.

KEYWORDS:

• School choice
• segregation
• Ireland

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Valerie Ledwith completed her BA at NUI, Galway and then moved to the United States, where she received her MA in geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent work engages with qualitative and quantitative methodologies (including GIS) to examine the emergence of educational disparities between young migrants and their non-migrant peers in Ireland.

Notes

1 See Benito, Alegre, and Gonzàlez-Balletbò (2014) for a comprehensive review of the effects of school segregation on educational equality and efficiency.

2 These small areas were created by The National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA) on behalf of the Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) in consultation with Central Statistics Office and comprise of between 50 and 200 dwellings.

3 While the dependent variable in the analysis is negatively skewed, the skewness statistic falls within the ±2 range considered acceptable for assumptions of normal distribution (George & Mallery, 2010).