The aims of the presentation is to:

• Reflect on the ways in which the choice of a place, locality and a school - is crucial in understanding the quality debate in education and how schools’ popularity (market value) relates to accumulated privilege in the social context of the place
• Provide statistical overview for the last twenty years (1997-2017) of the ethnic and social class segregation between neighbourhoods and between state schools in Reykjavík metropolitan area with the emphasis on the most extreme (hot and cold) neighbourhoods and schools in terms of market value (popularity), capital accumulation and whiteness

There is a lack of research that grasp the historical and current geography of social class and ethnicity in the Icelandic field of education. In educational policy research geographical location has become an important part of understanding racial and class differentiation and a concentration of privilege within a given field (Butler og  van Zanten, 2007; Reay, 2007; Taylor, McLeod, Butler og Vincent, 2011; Wacquant, 1989). In urban areas residence has become a contemporary battle over social distinction” (Butler, Hamnett, Ramsden og Webber, 2007).

The aim of the presentation is to provide a statistical overview of the current ethnic and social class segregation between neighbourhoods and between state schools in Reykjavík city area and how it has changed and developed for the last 20 years. The research design is based on work of those who have utilized and extended Bourdieusian class analysis in social (Savage, 2000; Skeggs, 2004) and educational research (Lareau, 2003; Reay, 1998; Reay, David og Ball, 2005).

The main results derive from a dataset (Statistics Iceland) that constitutes background information of all families with school-age children residing in Reykjavík for the years 1997, 2006 and 2016. The data derives mainly from tax reports, information on place of birth and information on education. The aim is to catch the emerging class difference between the 53 zones since 1997 by exploring economic, educational and cultural capital with a special focus on geographical distribution of the top 20%. That is economic capital in terms of 1) assets and 2) income, educational capital in terms of 3) educational level and cultural capital in terms of parents’ field of education. Cultural capital here refers to a university degree in cultural, artistic and or abstract fields such as arts, drama, foreign languages, humanities and abstract social sciences. The idea is to differentiate between members of the dominant class drawing upon Bourdieu’s analysis of class fraction (1984; 1998). He argues that the dominant class is divided into fractions where you have industrialists and commercial employers on the one hand (highest economic capital and lowest cultural capital within the dominant class) and on the other hand professors and artistic producers (lowest economic capital and highest cultural capital within the dominant class) (Weininger, 2005). The second source is a b) statistical overview of the students‘ mobility in/out of schools in Reykjavík for the last twenty years (source: Reykjavík Department of Education and Youth) to explore if policies of open enrollment have influenced the social geography in the schools. The third source derives from a dataset of qualitative interviews with parents of all social classes in Iceland (50) residing in different school zones of the metropolitan area. It gives opportunity to grasp the grapevine of schools and neighbourhood and the mechanism of social capital when choosing residence and schooling and how it is classed and racialized. Alltogether this research maps out the birth of a compulsory school market in Iceland that has been slowly emerging in the last twenty years. It is driven by a growing segregation in schools and neighbourhoods based on the intersections of social class and ethnicity and accumulated privilege/disadvantage in certain areas of the neoliberal Nordic welfare state.

Considerable ethnic and class divide between schools and neighbourhoods is evident in the data. Economic, educational and cultural capital have been accumulating in certain neighbourhoods of the Reykjavík metropolitan area. In 1997 there were already some class segregation but it has been widening for the last 20 years. Accumulation of economic privilege has almost doubled in certain neighbourhoods while there has been a further concentration of disadvantage in other parts of the city. Parental use of open enrolment policy has further increased the class and ethnic divide in the most disadvantaged area of Reykjavík and in recent years there has been extensive ‘white flight’ from the most disadvantaged school zone.

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