Many parts of Europe are facing detriment of structural schooling factors through depopulation and ageing, possibly exacerbating the costs of educational provision where youth population is in decline. This raises the question whether cohesion mechanisms ought to be used to sustain educational opportunities in areas that face a structural disadvantage, and if so, what spatial strategy to mitigate structural factor decline would be most efficient? Unfortunately, a comprehensive comparison of how structural factors affect current and future school costs is unavailable, and the costs implications of policy options are unknown. In order to provide the necessary data, the JRC is estimating the facility and travel costs of schooling across Europe together with the OECD and DG REGIO.  

To assess likely locations for schools, a fine-tuned version of  Kompil et al.’s (2019) location allocation approach is used, in conjunction with 2011 and 2035 age group population grids from the LUISA reference scenario 2020. Sizes of allocated schools are estimated; those school sizes are subsequently used to estimate the costs of maintaining that facility. First results from this approach show that, due to small schools, providing education in sparsely inhabited areas comes at a substantial additional cost; and that especially in rural areas where the youth population is expected to shrink drastically, the costs might become even higher, or access to schools might reduce drastically.