Multi-school catchment areas in Paris: how have they fared after three years?

In an attempt to reduce social segregation between middle schools and lower secondary schools in the capital, the City of Paris and the Paris Education Authority have been trialling a new method of allocating pupils to state middle schools and lower secondary schools since the start of the 2017 academic year: Multi-school catchment areas. This scheme involves defining catchment areas shared by several middle schools / lower secondary schools that are geographically close to one another but have contrasting social compositions. The aim is to expand the catchment areas of middle schools / lower secondary schools in order to rebalance their social intake. Two distinct methods were trialled for allocating pupils across the three dual-middle school / lower secondary school catchment areas established in the capital’s 18th and 19th arrondissements: alternating allocation and regulated school choice. The results from the first three years of the trial (the 2017 to 2019 school years) are encouraging. Two of the three catchment areas achieved their objective of social diversity and led to a marked reduction in the trend of pupils opting for private schools. In the third sector, following initially disappointing results, the disparities in social composition between the two middle schools began to narrow from the third year of the pilot scheme onwards, and the trend of pupils opting for private schools declined. Looking beyond the Parisian case, multi-school catchment areas represent a promising avenue for promoting social diversity in state secondary education where, as is the case in Paris, the population density is high enough and the urban fabric sufficiently diverse to allow for social mixing amongst school populations.