Social Diversity: A Review of Twelve Years of Targeting Priority Education Policies

Using data from the Base Centrale Scolarité (exhaustive data on pupils and schools,
BCS), we highlight a number of stylised facts regarding changes to the targeting of priority education during the 2004-2016 period and inter-secondary school segregation. To start, we observe
a decline in the proportion of disadvantaged pupils during the 2004-2014 period, followed by
a period in which the focus of priority education is shifted to the most disadvantaged populations from 2015 onwards. The calculation of a mutual information index and its decomposition
allows us to show that, in terms of social segregation, during a period characterised by relative
stability with regard to inter-school segregation at the global level, the differences between
secondary schools in priority education and others tended to narrow until 2014 before beginning
to increase again. The geographical decomposition of these indices shows that the fall in the
share of disadvantaged pupils was driven by the highly urbanised regions, but that the refocusing of priority education on the least diverse secondary schools concerned both rural and more
urbanised areas alike.