Conference Agenda

Teacher distribution across schools is a critical issue, since their individual and professional characteristics and patterns of professional mobility have a strong influence on student learning and the production of educational inequalities (Lothaire, Dumay & Dupriez 2012). There has been concern at the European level regarding the diminishing attractiveness of the teaching profession, the shortage of qualified staff in schools and the growing professional turnover of teachers in segregated education markets. There is also public discussion around the deteriorating status of the teaching profession (Farges, 2011), as the number of teacher education applicants has generally decreased over the last few years in many European countries. Residential and school segregation in the education sector have been widely examined in the sociology of education and human geography (e.g., Bonal & Belleï, 2018; van Zanten, 2009). However, teachersegregation, that is, the regionally uneven distribution of staff in different areas (urban vs rural; affluent vs disadvantaged), has aroused only limited scientific attention. The teachers’ professional choices are often treated in literature as rather rational choices optimizing their personal career trajectories either for higher positions or preferred and more prestigious schools, typically in affluent areas (Ingersoll & May 2012). Questions regarding teacher retention, attrition and turnover in the teaching have been analysed in the international research context, and several personal and environmental factors relating to choosing or leaving the teaching profession have been discussed. The more sociologically oriented debates typically range from teaching as a career choice and its relation to the labour market (e.g. Mathou et al. 2023) to teachers’ perceptions on leaving the profession: novice teachers tend to leave, for example, due to job insecurity and excessive workload, whereas experienced teachers tend to leave due to flat career trajectories (Amitai & van Houtte 2022). However, a more sociological understanding on the teachers’ social, educational and professional backgrounds and choices remains limited. In particular, little is known about how the social and professional stratification among teachers intersects with school segregation and how this contributes to educational inequalities.

This symposium draws together research on the construction of teacher segregation and the stratification of the teaching profession related to educational inequalities in three European countries, namely Finland, France and Sweden. These countries are selected for this symposium as representing different welfare-state regimes: Sweden and Finland from the social-democratic regime type, the difference lying in Sweden’s for-profit market mechanisms and relatively free school choice policies in comprehensive education and Finland’s non-profit, public school markets with limited school choice, and France from the state-corporativist model introducing both private school markets and large public school markets, in which the parental choice is regulated along the lines of school districts (carte scolaire). The different levels of marketisation, privatization and decentralization make Finland, France and Sweden, as educational systems, a very relevant comparison for the segregation of teachers.

In the presented papers we discuss questions concerning the status of the teaching profession, the social reasonings behind making professional choices between institutions above the typically named salaries and career progressment, and the social class background of teachers. With these sociological perspectives, the symposium aims to advance the understanding of teacher segregation as a structural phenomenon rather than merely an outcome of individual career choices among teachers.

This paper examines the distribution, sorting, and work preferences of lower secondary schoolteachers in Sweden against the backdrop of extensive educational reforms characterised by decentralisation, marketisation, and intensified competition between schools. Drawing on full-population register data and interviews with teachers, the study investigates how teachers are positioned within a local school market and how these positions relate to both school characteristics and teachers’ professional orientations. Methodologically, the paper integrates Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) with teacher interviews. The results reveal a pronounced stratification of the local teacher labour market. Teachers are unevenly distributed across schools according to employment security, length of experience, formal qualifications, educational background, and social origin. The MCA identifies a clear homology between teachers’ positions in the social space and the characteristics of the schools in which they work. Public schools, and certain non-profit independent schools to a greater extent have teachers with permanent contracts, longer experience, higher qualifications, and stronger local integration. In contrast, for-profit independent schools are more likely to employ teachers with temporary contracts, lower levels of experience, weaker formal qualifications, and higher turnover rates. These patterns are further accentuated when incorporating school-level segregation in terms of students’ social origin and migration background. The teacher interviews deepens this analysis by demonstrating that teachers’ structural positions disclosed by the MCA are closely linked to differentiated professional orientations. Teachers located in more stable and ”resource-rich” positions tend to articulate pedagogically oriented professional ideals and highlighted stronger collegial continuity. Teachers in more precarious positions, by contrast, describe constrained professional autonomy, higher organisational demands, and a different perspective regarding their orientation towards their employment. Taken together, the findings demonstrate how differentiation in a local school market not only structures the distribution of teachers across schools but also contributes to social and professional divisions within the teaching profession itself.

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Among the factors shaping educational quality worldwide, the social status of teachers has received increasing attention. Existing research consistently shows that teachers tend to place themselves in the middle of the social hierarchy. However, empirical evidence remains limited regarding the extent to which specific factors—particularly those related to teaching work and school contexts—account for variations in teachers’ perceptions of their professional social status. Our analysis draws on a questionnaire survey of 1,813 French primary school teachers, based on a representative sample constructed by statisticians from the Ministry of National Education. Our study shows that teachers’ assessments of their profession’s position within the social structure vary according to work-related factors and schools’ positioning within local education markets. At the same time, the analysis highlights the concurrent influence of subjective dimensions rooted not only in professional experience but also in social trajectories, interpersonal relationships, and exposure to competitive or hierarchical school environments. The paper concludes by discussing potential levers for improving teachers’ evaluations of their social position in an increasingly market-oriented educational system.

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The day-to-day operation of schools often appears to take place outside of the context of social class, even though class plays an important role in many educational processes, including in the Nordic context. In this study, we analyse 49 teacher interviews to examine Finnish teachers’ experiences, awareness and consciousness of social class. Teachers’ social role is positioned in relation to their original class background, the school institution, which is characterized by its middle-class nature and norms, and pupils’ social class backgrounds. We lean and elaborate on Meg Maguire’s theoretical conceptualization of different levels of class awareness. Our findings show that along with class experience, awareness and consciousness, teachers perform class ignorance, silence of class and even class denial. We contemplate the way in which this places pupils in unequal positions and potentially reinforces reproduction in education when teachers face class-related issues from very different starting points.

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