School segregation is currently one of the greatest educational and social challenges facing European countries and cities. The fight against school segregation has direct implications for the right to education, children's well-being, the quality of public services and social cohesion. The city of Barcelona is among the Catalan cities with the highest levels of school segregation, despite having been a pioneer in the development of local policies to mitigate this problem. In this context, and with the aim of responding to this issue, in 2018 the Barcelona Education Consortium promoted the "Shock plan against school segregation", a leading and innovative initiative in Europe that seeks to significantly reduce school segregation in the city through a wide range of measures. More recently, the approval of the new Admissions Decree by the Government of Catalonia in 2021 has helped to reinforce this policy, establishing a regulatory framework that consolidates many of the measures envisaged by the Shock Plan, but also incorporating new instruments to improve the distribution of socially vulnerable pupils. The main objective of this project is to determine the impact of the Shock Plan and the Admissions Decree on the distribution of socially vulnerable pupils in Barcelona's schools, as well as to analyse the functioning of the different instruments promoted by these policies. The project aims to capture not only the effect of educational policy on school segregation, but also how these policies are interpreted and influence the behaviour of schools and families, and how their impact varies depending on the social, geographical and educational context. With this objective, and combining two complementary methodological approaches (impact evaluation and realist evaluation), the project aims to provide evidence for political decision-making and the fight against school segregation from a local perspective.
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