The results of the first PISA study marked a turning point in the German education debate by highlighting the strong correlation between socioeconomic status and educational achievement, triggering a series of educational policy reforms. Despite numerous reform efforts, the influence of social background on educational opportunities in Germany remains well documented empirically and continues to be prominent (Busemeyer et al., 2023; OECD, 2023; Scharf et al., 2020). While this correlation has been researched extensively, less attention has been paid to the institutional mechanisms through which inequalities are (re)produced in the everyday structures and practices of the school system. Organizationally embedded regulations and procedures in legal and administrative documents can create differentiation processes that systematically disadvantage certain groups of students and perpetuate existing disparities (Böhmer, 2025). 

One theoretical perspective that has been used only rarely to date but offers great analytical potential for investigating such mechanisms is the concept of space as a product of social action (Kessl et al., 2016; Riveros & Nyereyemhuka, 2023). In a large part of educational research, space is assumed to be a neutral container concept that serves primarily to describe locational conditions (Berkemeyer et al., 2019). However, this view ignores the space-constituting mechanisms through which school systems, schools, and school actors actively, albeit unintentionally, create social orders through administrative requirements, school organizational structures, or practices of differentiation (Stočić, 2015). A relational understanding of space, on the other hand, conceives of space as a product of social actions and structures (Löw, 2016; Löw & Sturm, 2019) and makes it possible to analyse legal and administrative regulations not only as control instruments, but also as active producers of segregated educational spaces. 

The organization of the school system plays a central role here. International comparative studies show that education systems with early institutional stratification exhibit greater educational inequalities than those that educate students together as far as possible. The multi-tiered German school system contrasts sharply with single-tier systems such as the Canadian (Busemeyer et al., 2023; OECD, 2023). At the same time, both Germany and Canada are federally organized, resulting in a wide variety at the subnational level in terms of governance logics, legal requirements, and administrative structures. This similarity in governance, coupled with differences in the institutional logic of the organization of education, provides a particularly suitable framework for revealing mechanisms of differentiation. 

Given this, the PhD project looks at how differences based on students' socioeconomic status are created through institutional structures and practices, and how this leads to segregated educational spaces. The project includes three complementary sub-studies, each focusing on the macro, meso, and micro levels of the school system (Altrichter & Maag Merki, 2016; Fend, 2008). The first study, which is scheduled for presentation at the ECER conference, focuses on the macro level and examines the legal and administrative frameworks that structure the conditions under which school actors operate. The following research questionis central to this study: How are differences between students based on their social background created by legal and administrative regulations in Hamburg, Cologne, and Calgary, thereby (re)producing segregated educational spaces? The following two sub-studies of the dissertation then examine how these macrostructural guidelines are taken up, interpreted, and reconstructed in practice by school actors at the meso level of the school and the micro level of teaching, and whether further mechanisms of difference production become apparent in the process.

To answer the research question, the cities of Hamburg and Cologne (Germany) and Calgary (Canada) were selected as case studies based on statistical indicators and the results of national comparative studies. Socio-spatial segregation is particularly pronounced in urban agglomerations with a wide range of schools, which is why it is particularly interesting to compare large cities (Fölker et al., 2015; Stošić, 2012). Despite above-average results in terms of the fairness of the education system, the international comparison with Calgary should not simply serve as a blueprint by compiling existing findings on Canadian education and translating them to the German context. Instead, German and Canadian primary sources are analysed equally. However, the comparison opens up the possibility of overcoming blind spots in a purely national perspective and questioning researchers' views on what is known. In addition to school-related legal and administrative documents, the German Basic Law, the state constitutions of the two German states of Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, the Canadian Constitution, and the Constitution of the Province of Alberta were also included. This resulted in a data corpus of around 1000 documents, which was evaluated using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA). RTA is a variant of thematic analysis whose evaluation process is particularly open and interpretative, and which was further developed and described as a method by Braun & Clarke in particular. Unlike in English-speaking countries, it is not yet widely used in German-speaking countries and aims to develop reflexive themes in a six-step, iterative analysis process (Braun & Clarke, 2022). The necessary familiarity with the data requires restriction to documents relevant to research, which is why, in an initial review based on exclusion criteria (no reference to state-run general education schools, such as private schools or vocational schools), those documents that are not formally relevant to research are currently being sorted out. In a second review, documents that are relevant to the RTA are then selected based on inclusion criteria (reference to space, e.g. structural requirements; to difference, e.g. distinctions between students based on their support needs; to social background, e.g. the financial resources of their parents or guardians). Only then is the actual RTA carried out.

The evaluation process is currently still in its early stages but will be sufficiently advanced by August 2026 to produce initial results. Nevertheless, it is already clear that in all three case studies, the participation of all students is explicitly formulated as a goal in various legal texts. In the operationalization, however, in German legal documents social background is hardly mentioned directly as a dimension that contributes to inequality, in contrast to, for example, migration history, special education needs, or the gender of the students. It is expected that social background is implicitly effective in legal and administrative texts in Cologne and Hamburg but remains systematically underrepresented compared to other categories of difference. It is particularly interesting to compare the findings from Germany with the Canadian documents, as the spaces become visible. It is precisely this gap that proves to be central to understanding institutionally produced educational inequality. Initial findings indicate that social background, as well as other categories of difference among students, is a key category in the formulation of Canadian legal and administrative documents and is repeatedly placed at the centre of laws and administrative regulations. Furthermore, no passages have been found to date that point to the responsibility of schools or teachers in reproducing or combating social inequalities. This makes it clear that not only explicit regulations are relevant for the analysis, but also those aspects that are systematically omitted from legal texts. Especially interesting is comparing the results of Germany with the Canadian documents as the blank spaces become visible. In particular, the question of what differences can be seen between the individual case studies at the macro level and whether the patterns in the interviews can be found at the meso and micro levels forms a central starting point for the subsequent sub-studies.

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