Pioneering Policies and Practices Tackling Educational Inequalities in Europe (PIONEERED)
PIONEERED looks at educational inequalities with a view to reduce them. The project aims to propose research-informed policy measures and to identify pioneering policies and practices to enhance access to, uptake and completion of education. PIONEERED relies on a multilevel framework that considers mechanisms and innovations related to the macro level (e.g. educational and social policies on country or sub-levels), meso level (e.g. school institutional settings, transition procedures) and micro level (e.g. teachers, students, parents). This comprises a special focus on how policies intentionally or unintentionally shape educational settings – including formal (e.g. schools) and informal (e.g. family and peer groups) environments – and how the interplay between institutional conditions and individual characteristics and actions of the children and young adults becomes a source of advantages and disadvantages at transition points and trajectories. The MZES is actively involved in the work package, which aims to carry out a cross-national comparative study of the emergence and reproduction of intersectional disadvantages/advantages in educational trajectories and transitions across all stages in formal and informal educational settings. We focus on the intersectionality of gender and migration.
In 2023, we co-authored three papers that explore, from a cross-national perspective, the intersectional inequalities in students’ sense of belonging to school, academic achievement, and participation in shadow education at various stages of the educational path to be submitted to academic journals. In June, we presented our findings on intersectional inequalities in academic achievement at the ECSR thematic conference ‘Effort and Social Inequality’ in Madrid. We further contributed to the final project report by providing an analysis of promising practices to tackle ethnic, social, and gender inequality in education.