Educational inequalities pose critical concerns worldwide, including European education systems demonstrating relatively high performance in international educational assessment studies. Educational inequalities can be conceptualised as systematic disparities in access to educational resources, learning environments or learning outcomes that are related to students’ background or geographical location (OECD, 2013). A strong body of European research confirms that inequalities exist in terms of socioeconomic status (SES), immigrant background, ethnicity, gender, geographic location and school segregation, but much of this research is cross-sectional (see Campos et al., 2025). However, to be able to understand how inequalities evolve and what education systems can do to mitigate them through more effective policies and interventions, longitudinal research is needed. There have been initiatives across Europe to fill this gap in research gap, but currently the evidence is scattered and there is no clear overview of what kind of longitudinal datasets exists that would enable the identification of effective policies and practices promoting educational equality. For this reason, European Union began to fund five project under a Horizon Europe (HE) topic in 2024 to 1) map existing longitudinal data allowing to analyse trends in educational inequalities, 2) analyse available literature on inequalities in education, training and learning achievements over time, and 3) identify interventions that compensate inequalities in learning outcomes over time based on the analysis of longitudinal data.

The aim of this symposium is to give an overview of the theoretical underpinnings and the results achieved so far in all the five projects funded from this HE topic. Organised by the MapIE project coordinated by the hosting Tampere University, the topic and the symposium is introduced defining key concepts and research aims in the light of the results published in the systematic literature review conducted in MapIE (Campos et al., 2025). The four papers of the symposium present the first empirical results of the four other projects funded from the same HE topic: LINEup, STRIDE, REVERS-ED and LEARN.

The LINEup paper presents the results of systematic data mapping conducted in 32 European countries. Rather than focusing on a single national case, it examines cross-country variation in data availability, documentation practices, access conditions, and analytical potential, highlighting structural asymmetries and shared challenges in building longitudinal evidence on educational inequalities across Europe.

In STRIDE, the long-term effectiveness of major early childhood education interventions were evaluated in England and Norway. The paper adopts a comparative approach, where two different national cases with similar reforms are compared. In this way it is possible to investigate the association between reforms covering pre-school level and outcomes in upper secondary school in two different contexts and thus explore the contextual factors in how inequality is shaped, changed and preserved through the educational systems. 

The paper presented by the REVERS-ED project adopts a national perspective by analysing longitudinal standardised assessment data from Catalonia, a region in Spain with its own educational evaluation system, to compare educational achievement in a group of vulnerable schools that implement successful educational actions with the average educational achievements of all schools from the same region.

In the study conducted by LEARN, a comparative case-study design was applied to investigate how evidence-based education (EBE) principles are translated into practice within diverse national policy landscapes. Using initial scoping work from the UK, the barriers and approaches to EBE integration are examined in the Netherlands, Finland, and Switzerland.

Together, these presentations offer rich perspectives on research on educational inequalities in Europe. The results are discussed in the context of comparative education.

Campos, D. G., Koskinen, A., Munkácsy, B., Rolfe, V., Patsis, P., Tóth, E., Olsen, R. V., Scherer, R., Söldner, L., Danek, A. H., Greiff, S., & Vainikainen, M.-P. (2025). Educational inequalities in Europe: A scoping review of longitudinal studies in K–12 education. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 87, 101523. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2025.101523 OECD. (2013). PISA 2012 results: Excellence through equity (Volume II): giving every student the chance to succeed. OECD. https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264201132-en