In the context of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - CRPD - a broad understanding of inclusion is assumed, which has all people and here more specifically all students in mind - also those from less socio-economic backgrounds. Due to the still existing social inequity in the upper school system of the german-speaking areas (Quenzel & Hurrelmann 2019), it seems valuable for the discourse of educational research to ask about mechanisms of development in this situation. In this project we will show as theoretical background how mechanisms of institutional discrimination operate and how they can be confronted.

In order to make the complexity of discriminatory mechanisms, their structures and institutionalisation more tangible, Möller et al. (2020) describe institutional discrimination as when certain social actors or groups are negatively affected to an above-average extent by supra-individual norms, routines and rules as well as communal justifications represented in an institution and are disadvantaged as a result. Institutional discrimination can be discussed along various dimensions. For example, class repetition (Hummrich 2017) and recommendations for transfer to secondary schools are known to be socially selective (Stancel-Piatak 2017). Discrimination can also be discussed on the basis of educational equality (Heinemann & Mecheril 2017). Our focus will be on the perspective of how access to higher education can become non (or less)-socially selective.

The specific issue here is that the recruitment of new pupils, on the basis of statutory school districts, can have a social bias. This raises questions about the compositional effects of a diverse student population (Kramer 2017) and the resulting differences in learning and development environments (Weber 2020). At the center of this perspective is the issue that it is not pedagogical considerations that legitimise unequal treatment or access to schools, but rather institutional-organisational processes and wishes of the institution, which in turn can lead to a structural discrimination of entire groups (Heinemann & Mecheril 2017).

With this perspective, we want to present a school as a case study, which has found answers to these issues and which has developed itself from a socially deprived school in a social deprived area to a popular and highly requested school, which is able to recruit a diverse school population.

To provide responses to these questions, this paper is based on a study of 28 innovative participant schools of the German School Prize. All schools went through a rigorous and competitive process to be considered for the annual award. During the evaluation process, the schools were visited by a panel of experts who evaluated them according to six quality domains. These domains are 1. achievement, 2. dealing with diversity, 3. teaching quality, 4. responsibility, 5. school climate, school life and external partners, and 6. schools as a learning institution (Beutel, Höhmann, Pant & Schratz 2016) During on-site visits data were gathered on how school leaders act their roles in day-to-day work and how they translate and mediate policies in times of prevailing reforms on the system level (Ball et al., 2012). Document analyses, participatory observation, focus group interviews with teachers and students, classroom visits and in-depth interviews are among the methods used for gathering qualitative data. The data gathered from all schools where consolidated by an analysis based on the grounded theory methodology (Strauss & Corbin 1996) generating similarities and differences between individual schools.

From the study, one case studies will be presented which depict how school leaders from different schools with different attitudes use particular strategies in mediating policy for improvement successfully. They hold and use the space for improvement through personal professional interaction with the actors in the field. The result of the data analysed are 56 phenomenological argued facets of leadership (Schratz et al., 2019). The facets draw a diverse picture of various actions of school leaders. Sometimes they are overlapping, sometimes complementary, and sometimes they can be seen in isolation from each other. Together, they paint a picture of leadership, which is closely related to the experiences of the actors involved. Based on these findings, we try to show how this school deals with the conflicting question of student recruitment. We take this as a starting point to further elaborate on how this school has grown from a deprived location to a popular school.

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