Increasing segregation in Swedish compulsory schools has been frequently reported over the past decades (e.g., Yang Hansen, Patsis & Gustafsson, 2025) in relation to the decentralization, deregulation, privatization, and marketization reforms. However, little is known about the reforms’ long-term consequences for municipal differences in educational outcomes, educational inequality, and school segregation. The reforms of quasi-markets, institutional differentiation and school choice are often expected to increase openness and efficiency in education provision, they may also risk greater inequality and segregation across local contexts (e.g, Böhlmark, Holmlund & Lindahl, 2016). However, municipality-level longitudinal evidence remains limited for recent decades. Existing studies at the municipal level (e.g., Boman, 2022), rely typically on a small number of time points, which limits their ability to capture longer-term trends and to provide credible evidence. Using Swedish register data from 1998 to 2008, Gustafsson and Yang Hansen (2013) found increasing differences in academic outcomes between municipalities, particularly in metropolitan areas, with most variation occurring between schools within municipalities and between public and independent schools. Since 2008, Sweden has introduced further reforms to grading and curricula and experienced substantial societal changes, including rising income inequality and increased refugee settlement concentrated in certain municipalities. These developments may have affected patterns of segregation in compulsory education. This study therefore examines recent developments in school outcomes in Swedish compulsory schools, with particular attention to municipal variation and changes in educational equality over time. Using Swedish register data of all students between 2014 and 2024, we examine complete cohorts of students leaving compulsory school during the decade since 2014. The data include GPA at Grade 9 and detailed sociodemographic information, e.g., parental educational level, migration background. These data were aggregated to school and municipality levels. Additional municipality demographic factors, such as municipality types, percentage of inhabitants with migration background, teacher and school resources. To capture both initial differences and change over time, we apply two-level latent growth modeling techniques (e.g., Kaplan, 2009; McCormick, 2021), which allow for the analysis of heterogeneous developmental trajectories across municipalities while accounting for compositional differences in forms of time-varying covariates and time-invariant covariates. The expected findings may suggest that the consequences of market-oriented school reforms in combination of grading system curriculum and societal changes are neither uniform nor static but develop over time and interact with local conditions. The study contributes to the literature by providing longitudinal, municipality-level evidence on educational segregation.

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