Socio-educational inclusion is not a characteristic of the student. It is the result of an interaction between the conditions that systems offer and the experiences students actually live. This seemingly simple shift in perspective has significant consequences for how we measure, interpret, and ultimately improve inclusion in European schools.

Across Europe, classrooms have become places of profound linguistic, cultural, and social diversity. Yet millions of students with a migrant background still face structural disadvantages that their native-born peers do not. They leave school early at rates more than three times higher, score lower on standardised assessments, and are overrepresented in lower-track vocational pathways. These are not individual failures. They are signals of systems that were not designed to support everyone equally.

The ECEPAA project was built to look beyond these figures and ask: where exactly does the socio-educational inclusion process break down — and why?

A new way of measuring inclusion

To answer this, we developed a multidimensional index that examines socio-educational inclusion among first- and second-generation migrant students in four European countries: Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Greece. The index goes beyond grades and test scores, and examines four dimensions: formal schooling (academic pathways, outcomes, and support structures), relational (peer relationships, teacher interactions, family engagement), extracurricular (participation in school and community life beyond the classroom), and institutional (school-level practices, independently of national policy).

Together, these four dimensions allow us to capture what top-down policy indices like MIPEX and outcome-focused assessments like PISA cannot: the level where policy meets practice, where institutional conditions and student experiences intersect every day.

Our primary instrument is a structured questionnaire for upper secondary teachers in the four partner countries. Teachers observe what macro-level data cannot capture: the daily interactions, the unspoken expectations, the small exclusions or inclusions that shape a student’s path over time.

What comes next

Over the coming weeks, we will publish four posts — one for each dimension — exploring what we measure, why it matters, and what the data is beginning to tell us. Each will be accompanied by a methodological note for readers who want to go deeper.

This series is also the lead-up to the first annual ECEPAA Report, our annual publication tracking socio-educational inclusion indicators across the four partner countries. It will be the first comparative snapshot of socio-educational inclusion for students with a migrant background at this scale in Europe.

Because what happens to these students in our schools is not inevitable. It depends on choices — institutional, relational, political — that can be seen, measured, and changed.