The European Cities Against School Segregation (ECASS) project sets the objective of creating innovative solutions for local government to tackle school segregation in European cities. School segregation is a burden to achieve equal opportunities for all and social and educational inclusion. As one of the main difficulties to undertake efficient education policies in this area is the transfer gap between researchers and policymakers, the ECASS project has been designed as a collaborative workspace between recognised research experts and local education authorities in three cities: Barcelona, Milan and Oslo. The project will generate innovative solutions in five main policy areas: admission policies, school supply, systems of detection and enrolment of vulnerable students, communication policies and priority policies addressed to disadvantaged schools and students. The ECASS consortium is composed of professionals from three research centres and three local education authorities. The project has designed a methodological strategy to maximise collaboration and co-design to reduce the transfer gap, such as a system of co-leading and mixing teams from research centres and local government agencies. The consortium will collaborate intensely with the City Policy Platforms (CPP) from each city, which will be composed by education stakeholders, including school-parent associations, headteachers and teachers (especially working in vulnerable contexts), teacher unions, representatives of district school boards, other local technicians and policymakers and civil society organizations working with vulnerable children. The consortium and the associate partners will collaborate in the production of project outputs. The ECASS project foresees the production of six innovative products that will boost innovation in the area of desegregation education policies. These include a catalogue of indicators and datasets to facilitate evidence-based decision-making; a database of innovative policies to tackle school segregation; policy recommendations and guidelines to reduce school segregation in European cities; course materials for local policymakers and other education stakeholders; an interactive workspace for school cooperation and information packs for families. The project includes a comprehensive dissemination plan by which all these outputs will be open access and available to the general public in the project's website as well as in institutional repositories. In addition, some outputs will be included in the School Gateway portal as a useful resource for schools and local policymakers. The three cities participating in this project are facing important challenges in educational inclusion, especially linked to the arrival of migrant and refugee population. The transnational character of the project will provide extremely useful knowledge since the three cities must respond to similar challenges from three different systems of school choice and three different institutional frameworks regarding the role of local education authorities in education policy. Both the similarities and differences between cities provide an excellent context for evaluating different scenarios of causes and characteristics of school segregation and for producing innovative solutions that can be scaled up. ECASS will help to put desegregation policies at the forefront of priorities to achieve a real inclusive education. Its result will contribute to building more equal and cohesive societies in Europe.
The main objective of the ECASS project was to produce innovative policy solutions to tackle school segregation, and improve the social and educational inclusion of vulnerable groups. We aimed at producing intellectual outputs that could be implemented by policymakers and other educational stakeholders at the city level. Our main objective was to bring evidence and tools that could boost local education policy agendas for educational inclusion and diversity.
We applied to this project to address the problem of school segregation in European cities, by focusing our work in three cities (Barcelona, Mil,an and Oslo). School segregation is a burden to achieve equal opportunities for all as well as social and educational inclusion. The ECASS project focused in particular on bridging the transfer gap between researchers and policymakers. It has been a collaborative alliance between recognized research experts and local education authorities from the 3 above-mentioned cities. From this alliance we produced four innovative products in five policy areas, paying special attention to dissemination to ensure its use among policymakers and other stakeholders.