1 Vera Messing Apart or together: motivations behind ethnic segregation in education across Europe (To be published as the first chapter in Schiff, C and Szalai, J. (eds.) : Being ‘visibly different’. Post-colonial, migrant and Roma youths in education across Europe. To be published in 2013-14 by Palgrave.) I. The context There is a longstanding academic and policy debate about the possible causes underlying the performance gap between ethnic majority and minority students across Europe. The fact that ethnic minority students under-perform compared to their peers has been widely demonstrated by a range of national as well as cross- country comparative studies. (OECD 2006, Crul and Schneider 2008, Modood, Dronkers 2010, Park and Sandefour 2008). A number of factors underlying this gap have been identified, of which the most important are the lower socio- economic status of ethnic minority populations, in general and their language disadvantages. The analysis of the intersecting effects of these two factors reveals some important country-specific differences though: when groups with similar status and identical language backgrounds were compared the gap disappeared in several countries (France, Norway, Sweden), diminished significantly in others (i.e. Germany) or stayed significant (Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland) (Park, Sandefour 2010). These results suggest that behind the performance gap there must be other factors related to the organisation and practices of education. Besides individual characteristics such as the generation since immigration, the country of origin (Dronkers 2010), systemic factors such as comprehensiveness, selectivity and inclusiveness of the school systems (Alegre and Arnett 2007, OECD 2007), the level of ethno-social segregation seem to contribute to the disadvantages of ethnic minorities in education. This chapter will discuss the role of the factor mentioned last: ethno-social segregation. Irrespective of the method applied and of the definition of the category 1 ‘ethnic minority’ researchers agree on the prevalence of ethno-social segregation in European societies. Regardless of the diversity of educational policies and the organisational setup of the educational systems of European societies, it has been demonstrated that a significant proportion of children from ethnic minority backgrounds (especially if also from low social status) tend to be educated in segregated conditions: “Findings indicate that, in several countries, many immigrant students attend schools with high proportions of first-generation or second-generation students.” (OECD 2006) Countries with highly 1 whether it includes first or second generation migrants or both, non-migrant minorities (such as Roma/Gypsy)