The integration within the European Union of Romania and Bulgaria has generated an increased visibility of the Roma immigration in France – and in Europe –, especially in the public sphere. The Romas’ typical lifestyle, centered on the extended family group, creates a specific migration process for them: collective migration. This collective migration leads to challenges in finding formal types of accommodation. Hence, the Roma are forced to occupy alternative habitats, in other words slums and squats. This illegal occupation of space has itself led to expulsions and evictions that engender the Romas geographical mobility on a more or less wide area.

In this context of social and spatial instability, the issue of the Roma children’s education in France is worthy to be studied in detail. Thus, it is highly important to see the origins and the specificities of those factors that influence the academic trajectories of the Roma children and their impact on their education in terms of time. How do Roma children manage to integrate the French academic system? How do the phenomena of absenteeism, de-schooling and dropping out affect Roma children? Is there a specific mechanism, created by macro, meso and micro social factors, influencing the Roma children’s academic trajectories?

Social reproduction is generated by academic institutions (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1970) as they tend to encourage the values of children coming from advantaged backgrounds and ignore those of underprivileged children or those coming from a different cultural background, who are either way suffering from a socio-cultural handicap (Esterle-Hedibel, 2006), a context that is completely antithetical to the idea of equal opportunity. In this competitive setting (Broccolichi & Van Zanten, 1997), the Roma children who come from an underprivileged background are directly inferior to the children that are part of the majoritarian group. Hence, school failure can be considered as a democratic failure as schools – as part of the governmental apparatus – participate to engender social inequalities. School failure can thus be envisioned as not only the child’s failure, but that of the academic institution itself. The underprivileged child will be in conflict with the values and the norms that the school promotes and which oppose those that his/her family follow (Dubet & Martucelli, 1996).

The child’s underprivileged familial and social background is also due to the insufficiency of cultural capital within the family. The family’s cultural shortcomings, the lack of strategies (Déchaux, 2007), as well as the parents’ – those who have attended segregated schools in Romania – negative view when it comes to schooling can have a serious impact on the child’s intellectual development. Hence, teachers have more or less expectations from children and the latter adapt to these expectations accordingly. The socio-cultural handicap, absenteeism and the lack of attention given during classes lead to gaps in the child’s educational process, which can be a determining factor for dropping out. This analysis thus shows that the Roma children’s educational process and academic trajectories are influenced by personal factors, such as: self-esteem, being motivated to learn and a sense of responsibility.

Beyond the above, the French political landscape is an important factor to take under consideration as today it focuses on a selective immigration and removal of the “unwanted” policy. Hence, it is important to address the issue of the respect of the Romas’ rights (Marchand, 2001) as European citizens and the issue of academic integration of migrant children public policies. Elements that are not part of the family are likely to negatively influence the Roma children’s academic behavior and trajectories.

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