The first dimension of the ECEPAA Index starts where most people assume the story of integration begins and ends: inside the school, in the formal academic experience of students with a migratory background. But looking at formal schooling through the lens of the ECEPAA framework means asking a different kind of question — not just whether students are succeeding, but what the system is doing that makes success more or less likely.

Across Europe, students with a migratory background consistently face steeper obstacles in formal schooling. They leave school earlier, score lower on 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 — and they are the starting point of the first dimension of the ECEPAA Index.

How does the dimension work?

The dimension is built around five interconnected variables: academic performance, early school leaving, educational tracking, access to language support, and grade repetition. As our summary on this dimension shows, these variables do not operate independently: they form a causal chain. Tracking shapes the environment in which performance is measured; inadequate language support limits what students can demonstrate academically; poor results increase the risk of grade repetition; and repetition is one of the strongest predictors of early school leaving. Understanding this chain as a system, rather than as a collection of isolated indicators, is what makes the ECEPAA approach different.

This dimension also highlights something that statistics alone cannot capture: the gap between what national policy frameworks formally provide — in terms of language support, reception structures, or intervention protocols — and what actually reaches students in the classroom. A student who speaks fluently with classmates but struggles to succeed in a school assessment is not failing. They are at a well-documented stage of language acquisition that schools frequently misread as a lack of ability. It is precisely this kind of school-level texture that the ECEPAA teacher questionnaire is designed to recover.

As the summary concludes, the formal school dimension is the essential entry point into a systemic understanding of educational integration — but not its entirety. Formal outcomes are shaped by what happens in relationships between peers and teachers, by participation in life outside school, and by the institutional resources schools deploy. These are the dimensions we will explore in the posts that will follow.

Download the full summary on the “Formal School” dimension to go deeper into the methodology and the five variables.