Breaking the barrier? The effects of the National Program Rotterdam South on educational mobility

Dit project heeft in 2020 een ODISSEI Microdata Access Grant (MAG) ontvangen.

Projectaanvrager: dr. Gijs Custers (EUR-ESSB).

Project abstract

Educational mobility in the Netherlands has generally increased in the post-WWII period, but advancing equality of educational opportunity in poor urban areas remains a serious challenge. Large cities are spatially segregated along ethnic and socioeconomic lines, which can exacerbate educational inequalities. The National Program Rotterdam South is a major social policy program that aims to improve educational performances in this urban area. The ‘educational pillar’ of the program explicitly aims to improve the educational outcomes of children from lower class backgrounds.

However, systematic research on whether children from disadvantaged families profit from this policy is lacking. This research project will therefore investigate to which extent educational mobility has increased in Rotterdam South and other urban areas. It will focus on the relation between the parents’ educational level and the children’s school level at age 15 before and after the National Program Rotterdam South started. Thus it intends to assess the impact of this program on the educational mobility rates in Rotterdam South.


Conducting research with CBS microdata

Statistics Netherlands (CBS) collects a wide range of data for its statistical tasks, many of them microdata at the level of individual persons or organisations. Protection of the confidentiality of the data has the highest priority for CBS. Within strict safety conditions however, universities and other authorized research institutes can get Remote Access to such data to perform statistical analyses for their own scientific or statistical purposes. The microdata themselves remain strictly within a secure environment within CBS. Under applicable conditions researcher can also bring in additional dataset to be linked with CBS microdata. Before aggregate statistical results are exported from the secured environment, CBS will check whether these results do not contain any risk for disclosure of information on individual persons or organisations.

Read more about using microdata within the CBS Remote Access Environment.


Photo: Photo by Niels Kehl on Unsplash.