This article examines the dynamics of the relationship between residential and school segregation in Barcelona. The analysis explores which educational and non-educational drivers foster the school segregation of foreign students between the city’s neighbourhoods. The article also analyses to what extent the particularities of Barcelona’s admissions policy, which combines catchment areas with high levels of school choice, generate specific mechanisms of contextually bound school segregation within the local education market. The results confirm that residential segregation and educational segregation are two interrelated phenomena in Barcelona. In addition, the supply of publicly subsidised private schooling in the neighbourhoods is a main factor driving both educational segregation and isolation, especially in those neighbourhoods with a high concentration of foreign pupils. Based on the results, the article elaborates on the challenges for local education policymaking to address the dynamics of school segregation in urban spaces.

The debate on territorial cohesion and spatial inequality recognises the role and influence different scales have on individuals' opportunities with extended effects especially for young people's life chances. In particular, a regional perspective into territorial disparities of socio-economic conditions and welfare in Europe provides a more fine-grained view on the existence of territorially diverging income and labour market conditions for youth that a national level analysis is not able to grasp. This paper focus on regional differences in school to work outcomes of young people using macro-panel data covering the period from 2005 until 2016. We use a plurality of indicators to study to what extent school to work transitions are better studied at regional level and to characterise those transitions in a more comprehensive way. Our findings demonstrate that there are huge differences both in the level and in the dispersion of young people's school to work outcomes across European territories. This tells us that the allegedly assumed national homogeneity of transition systems can definitely not be taken for granted. Moreover, we show that the Great Recession had strong but differentiated impacts at regional level.

Research in the social sciences has focused extensively on the relationship between family background, educational attainment and social destination, on the one hand, and on the processes of skills creation and skills use, on the other. This paper brings these two branches of the literature together by examining the correlation between a range of social factors. The methodology we adopt provides a comprehensive approach to the study of the channels through which literacy skills are acquired, taking into account the interrelation of family background, educational attainment, and the use of skills at work and at home. We use the Programme of International Assessment of Adult Competences (PIAAC) dataset and apply a structural equation model (SEM). Our results show that family background and education play an important role in the configuration of adult skills and skill practices. Unequal family access to resources has a strong impact at later stages in life and strongly affects educational attainment and skills outcomes. Additionally, skills use has a positive and direct impact on adult skills.

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Countries’ institutional configurations and structural characteristics play an important role in shaping transitions from school to work. Recent empirical evidence shows significant regional and territorial differences in youth unemployment and labor market participation. Along this research strand, we argue in favor of a place-sensitive approach to youth labor market integration in order to address the regional disparities of young people’s opportunities. In order to investigate the synergic effect of different contextual configurations, we construct a composite measure, namely, the youth labor market integration (YLMI) index. This considers a wide range of indicators of the access, exclusion, and duration of the transition into employment at the regional level. The YLMI index allows cross-regional and longitudinal comparisons of the European Union (EU) local labor markets and youth employment opportunities.

Territorial disparities and youth labour markets have been often considered as separated themes, due to challenges in data availability. Comparative regional or sub-regional research on youth labour market integration have been therefore scarse. In this article, we address this gap by presenting a composite measure of Youth Labour Market Integration (YLMI) that covers a wide range of indicators and sheds light on the EU territorial divide of young peoples´ opportunities at regional level. In order to build the YLMI index, we use benefit-of-the-doubt-weighting, a seminal methodology on composite indicators (CI) that combines sequence with conditional weights based on the range of each sub-indicator. To proof the usefulness of YLMI, we analyze the evolution of regional youth labour market integration in the EU before and after the economic crisis; and the trends of homogenization or differentiation across EU territories. Furthermore, we investigate to what extent employment conditions, skills supply and technological resources explain cross-regional variations in youth labour market integration.

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This article explores the relationship between school choice, student mobility and school segregation in Barcelona. The case of Barcelona is particularly interesting because the school admissions policy combines a particular design of catchment area with a significant level of choice options. We work on students and school register datasets for the school year 2016-2017 to observe the association between the socioeconomic characteristics of the students and their residential and educational geographical distribution. The article tests whether recent reforms that have undermined the role of residential proximity in admissions policy have impacted on the school segregation of three groups of socially disadvantaged students (foreign students, students entitled to Free School Meals (FSM) and students who are Recipients of Social Allowances (RSA)). We explore different patterns of mobility between socially disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students and the impact of opting out from neighbourhood schools on school segregation. By using a counterfactual approach that compares real enrolment with simulated school enrolment in proximity schools, we provide evidence of a significant reduction of school segregation for all socially disadvantaged students, showing the negative effects of the current high number of school choice options. In addition, our analysis shows that school choice boosts remarkably the inequality between public and private subsidised schools. The final section of the article reflects on the implications of our findings for potential reforms in the current definition of catchment areas and the overall school choice policy in Barcelona.