Abstract

We examine policies that may help to combat educational inequalities in the competences achieved (i.e. quality of education). Using cross-sectional data we demonstrate the existence of correlation between several institutional characteristics of educational systems and student achievement, including early tracking, vocational orientation, and forms of national standardization. When we look at mere schooling we can adopt we take a more longitudinal approach to educational policies. Thanks to new data collection, we describe various policies to combat inequality in educational attainment, both in terms of distributions and in terms of inequality of educational opportunity by social groups. Finally, we encompasses the relationships between the whole set of educational policies, educational distributions and income inequality. By complementing contemporary EU SILC data on educational and earnings attainments with comparative student achievement data from the 1960s onwards, we examine to what extent educational policies affect the quality and quantity of education, and how these educational distributions relate to the level of income inequality. In the concluding section discusses the potential opposition to the implementation of these policies. 2