“Three Bedrooms and a Nice School”-Residential Choices, School Choices and Vicious Circles of Segregation in the Education Landscape of Finnish Cities

Abstract

This chapter asks how socio-spatial segregation, school choices and residential choices are related in the relatively egalitarian Finnish education system. In many countries, school choice policies have been viewed as a means of desegregating schools by removing the immediate link between home address and school allocation through allowing pupils to select schools in different locations. However, international research points to school choice increasing school segregation, and our long-term research on the Helsinki metropolitan area demonstrates this in the Finnish context as well. The tendency towards school segregation is increased by the effect that school and school catchment area segregation have on the residential mobility of families with children. By combining register-based research and qualitative evidence, we describe the complex interconnections of social and spatial processes contributing to growth of segregation and educational inequality in urban schools and neighbourhoods in Finland. Processes operating at multiple scales exacerbate the risk of self-perpetuating vicious circles of segregation, where segregation in schools and neighbourhoods feed into each other. Besides the macro-level patterns of segregation in the cities and their education systems, local hierarchies between neighbouring schools and between school classes may further segregate schools and their individual catchment areas. Such micro-level processes may lead to growing segregation even when initial differences are small, as parents compare and navigate the network of schools close to their residential location, and school reputations mediate choices in local school markets. Our research has unearthed multiple mechanisms creating growing divides between schools, demonstrating that not even a relatively egalitarian educational system with high overall quality of schools is entirely shielded from segregation tendencies, which may lead to a decline in equality and greater risks of educational exclusion.