Socio-Geographical Mobilities : A Study of Compulsory School Students’ Mobilities within Metropolitan Stockholm’s Deregulated School Market

Abstract: The Swedish educational reforms of the 1990s introduced a choice- and voucher-based system, which allowed students to choose schools regardless of their proximity to them. As a consequence, new opportunities for geographical disparities in educational provisions as well as in home-to- school mobilities have emerged. The following thesis addresses this development by focusing on compulsory school (grade 9) students’ home-to-school mobility patterns. More specifically, a Bourdieusian lens is applied to understand mobility in terms of both physical and social space. In contrast to the Bourdieusian tradition, articulations between social and physical space are operationalized by constructing individually defined, scalable neighbourhoods. The software EquiPop is used to compute neighbourhood context neighbours in the municipality of Stockholm (n = 779 079) using the k-nearest neighbour algorithm (k = 1 600). A k-means cluster analysis is applied to construct income-based neighbourhood types. On this basis, this thesis asks about the localizations and positions of schools and students as well as about the mobility patterns and predictors of students residing in low-income, and thus economic capital deprived, neighbourhoods (n = 2 346). Utilizing register data, the study finds an unequal distribution of educational provisions in relation to different providers, i.e. municipal schools and independent schools, as well as different school types. Furthermore, the results indicate that students from low-income neighbourhoods are unequally mobilized dependent on migration background and the educational background of mothers. Moreover, independent schools have been found to be a attractive alternative for students from low-income neighbourhoods.