Social and ethnic inequalities have received considerable attention in educational research. The lecture will address a question that has received surprisingly little attention, especially in quantitative research - whether students from socio-economically disadvantaged background and minority students feel more unfairly treated in school, more often feel out of place, and more alienated from school than high SES and majority students. To answer these questions, we use novel data from a large project on "Students' Perceptions of Inequality and Fairness in School and Society" (PerFair), collected in three German states in 2022/23. In short, we find that it is not low SES children in general, but rather ethnic minority students in particular, who feel unfairly treated, reflecting high but often unmet educational aspirations. In terms of feelings of not belonging, we find no evidence in our data to support a common claim in the qualitative literature: That the school as a typically "middle class" institution (e.g. in terms of the socio-economic background of the teachers), alienates children from lower SES and minority backgrounds.

Claudia Diehl is a professor of Microsociology at the University of Konstanz and co-speaker of the Cluster of Excellence The Politics of Inequality. Currently she is working on integration processes among new immigrants in Europe and on xenophobia and ethnic discrimination. She spent several years abroad, most recently as a distinguished visiting fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and as the DAAD Hannah-Arendt visiting professor at the Munk School of Foreign Affairs and Public Policy in Toronto. Claudia Diehl has been appointed to The Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder in the Federal Republic of Germany and she is also a member of the Advisory Board for Family Affairs. Her publications include a special issue of Ethnicities on early integration patterns of recent migrants in four European countries, an edited volume on ethnic educational inequality in Germany, and numerous journal articles on migration, integration, and ethnic discrimination.