The adoption of specific priorities in the educational policies associated with additional funding arises as a kind of measure for promoting the school success of socially excluded children. In fact, as we will notice further on, the definition of priorities in the distribution or allocation of funds to schools is usually dependent on criteria connected with the proportion of pupils in the school population that are particularly at risk of being excluded from the education system.

Educational priority policies (EPP) can be regarded as a lever for the development of positive discrimination processes designed to support schools or educational areas that are undergoing problems that have a special importance in the regional or national context. These positive discrimination processes can be achieved in practice through actions such as remedial teaching, extra language courses for migrant children, differentiation within the classroom, and so on.

The content of the actions conducted under educational priority policies will not be described in this chapter, because these types of actions are discussed in detail in other chapters (see, for example, Chapters 5, 6, 10 and 13). As far as possible, we will present a typology of measures and actions that are usually associated with the financing mechanisms of educational priority policies.

It must also be stressed that educational priority policies are part of the regular or mainstream education system, and are not related to the alternative routes in education, such as special education.

To summarise, the delimitation of the subject of this chapter – educational priority policy – is based upon three crucial criteria:

• • it is mainly about additional financing mechanisms that allow special support to be provided in specific areas or to specific groups of students with more serious problems of integration in the education system;

• • it implies positive discrimination over other educational areas and groups of students where the school exclusion problems are less serious;

• • finally, the application of this policy takes place in the mainstream education system.

The objectives of educational priority policies

Generally speaking, educational priority policies are based on objectives that are very similar throughout the different countries.