The spatial concentration of immigrant pupils at primary and lower secondary schools in the Czech Republic

Abstract

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain and especially since joining the European Union, the Czech Republic has become a country with a sharply growing number of immigrants, who more and more often are coming to the country with the purpose of settling long term and starting a family. This change places demands on society as a whole but also on particular areas such as the education system, which needs to integrate these children successfully and ensure that they are provided with quality education. The experiences of countries with a long history of migration have shown a negative correlation between the extent of concentration of non-citizen pupils in a school and their academic performance. Such a relationship is explored in this article which examines the degree of concentration of non-citizen pupils at Czech primary and lower secondary schools both in terms of concentration in individual regions, as the spatial distribution of immigrants tends to be very unequal, and in terms of concentrations at particular schools within individual regions. The article shows that despite a current growing concentration of non-citizen students in some regions, there is not clear evidence to confirm a growing segregation at particular schools.