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Abstract
This paper highlights the importance today of the spatial dimension within the analysis of parents' education strategies concerning their school choices at the secondary school level. This study is based on the 2 dimensions of the concept of spatial capital (Lévy, Citation1994): position capital and situation capital. It explores sociospatial schooling practices of all pupils between the ages of 11 and 15 living in Lille and attending a secondary school in 2006. The Lille example reveals the importance of taking into account the configuration of the local school provision. It also underlines the benefit of the multidimensional concept of spatial capital. In this way, control over the spatial dimension appears to be a capital in its own right, unequally distributed among social groups, which contributes to the production of schooling inequalities in urban environments.
Notes
1. Choosing a private school or bypassing one public establishment to attend another: exemption from the school zoning system (the official school allocation system in France in which children living in a certain catchment area are theoretically required to attend a specific school), taking options or rare languages, change or falsification of address, etc.
2. Mobility is a polysemous concept. It can be used to describe the movement of individuals within a social space (social mobility) or within a physical space (spatial mobility). In terms of spatial mobility, we generally distinguish between four meanings: residential mobility (which relates to changes in residence), migration (emigration and immigration movements), travel (tourism), and daily mobility (that is, daily commuting). This paper focuses on the latter type of spatial mobility.
3. The data file was developed as part of a partnership between the Agence de Développement Urbain de Lille Métropole (Lille urban development agency), the Rectorat de Lille (Lille's education authority), and the Inspection Académique du Nord (the schools' inspectorate for the northern region).
4. Or “Socio-professional categories and professions”, a term describing the classification system used by the INSEE (French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies) to categorise the French population).
5. Corporate administrative and sales managers, public sector managers, business owners with 10 or more employees, corporate engineers and technicians, teachers and their equivalent, information, art and live performance professions, liberal professions.
6. Tradesmen and women, shopkeepers, foremen and supervisors, corporate administrative staff, employees, primary school teachers, police and military personnel, middle administrative professions, middle professions in the health and social work sectors, retired tradesmen, shopkeepers and business managers, retired top and middle management professions.
7. Unemployed persons who have never held employment, public sector support staff, unskilled workers, skilled workers, employees in direct contact with private individuals, persons without a professional activity, retired employees and workers.
8. IRIS corresponds to a divisional unit developed by the INSEE to map population census data at an infra-communal level. IRIS is a “neighbourhood”, which is defined as a set of adjoining blocks (blocks of houses), 5,000 inhabitants are “brought together” in an IRIS 5000.
9. For reasons of clarity, these tables will not display the data relating to the Chi-square test, but we will systematically base our analyses on the most significant contributions per Chi-square case.
10. The proportion of pupils from lower SPCs varies between 17.2% and 88.7% in public schools and between 1.4% and 60.2% in private schools.
11. Flexible school zoning is a procedure under which a pupil is allocated a place in a public establishment located in the area in which they live, combined with official exemption measures granted by education authorities to help pupils who meet certain criteria (social, health, family, etc.). These tolerance measures, which determine the allocation of pupil places in the public establishments in France, have gradually been extended since the 1980s and are currently widely used.
12. We estimate that, on average in France, 20% of pupils are educated in a private school and near 20% in a public school other than the one allocated to them in their geographical area. These averages tend, however, to hide the major discrepancies that exist in practice according to the schooling context, and in particular according to whether the education is provided in a major urban metropolitan area or outside these areas (especially more rural contexts).
13. Variable which has more than two categories.
14. This probability is 4.24 when we compare, all other things being equal, local choices and distant choices.
15. These establishments are coveted resources within the framework of varied and socially differentiated strategies: the search for elitism or the same socioeconomic group, for a social mix in a segregated schooling situation, etc.