While Europe celebrates equality, Roma children in Slovak schools face discrimination

Slovakia now has extensive evidence of the existence of segregation of Roma children in education, write Vlado Rafae and Kamila Gunišová.

Vlado Rafael is the Director of the Bratislava-based EduRoma rights organisation, Kamila Gunišová is a Researcher at Amnesty International Slovakia

Tomorrow, on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, political representatives across Europe will once again reaffirm their commitments to equality and non-discrimination. And yet despite these assurances, racial separation continues to shape children’s daily lives, across parts of Europe.

In Slovakia, Roma pupils continue to be educated in separate schools or classes, with significantly worse educational opportunities. Domestic courts have repeatedly found discrimination against Roma children in education over the past 15 years. Civil society has documented segregation for decades. In 2023, the European Commission referred Slovakia to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to address this systemic discrimination.

Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta has already concluded in the statement that Slovakia has “systematically and persistently failed” to fulfil its obligations under EU equality law. Her opinion underscores a crucial point: EU anti-discrimination law requires not only formal commitments, but the effective elimination of discrimination in practice. Despite this legal framework, public scrutiny and mounting evidence, segregation remains a significant feature of Slovakia’s education system.

In 2024, following international commitments, the Ministry of Education introduced regular monitoring of segregation in schools. According to the second round of this monitoring, published this year, 456 out of 2,058 primary schools in Slovakia were identified as being at risk of segregation — more than one fifth of all schools. At this scale, segregation is not incidental. It is structural.

At the same time, the monitoring does not provide a complete picture. It focuses primarily on mainstream public primary schools and does not capture segregation in special classes and special schools, where Roma children are disproportionately placed. A significant part of the system through which segregation operates therefore remains unaccounted for.

The methodology further obscures the reality. The Ministry of Education does not measure segregation directly on the basis of ethnicity, even though ethnicity is at the core of the discrimination repeatedly identified by courts and experts. Instead, the state relies on proxy indicators such as socio-economic disadvantage, poverty or language background. This approach creates a fundamental gap: patterns of exclusion can be mapped, while the racial dimension of segregation remains formally unacknowledged. As a result, official data underrepresents the scale of discrimination.

Crucially, identifying segregation does not lead to dismantling it. Schools flagged in the monitoring are not subject to automatic, enforceable desegregation measures. The system records segregation without requiring its elimination.

Following a series of legislative amendments in summer 2025, new rules were introduced assigning pupils to public schools based on their place of residence. While this provides easier and geographically closer access to education for children from more advantaged backgrounds, in the case of Roma children living in socially excluded localities or deprived urban areas, the same rule may reinforce existing residential segregation. Moreover, it may facilitate the construction of new schools in marginalised areas, thereby further entrenching and institutionalising segregation in the years ahead.

In practice, there is also a growing trend in which teaching staff attempt to make segregated schools more inclusive by strengthening the teaching of Roma language, culture and history within school curricula. However, this often rests on the mistaken assumption that reinforcing minority identity can offset the profound psychological and educational consequences of segregated schooling on children’s overall development.

This creates a striking paradox. While it is important to teach about Roma history, language and cultural contributions, even in schools where Roma pupils are segregated, children are taught about equality and tolerance in environments that do not provide equal access to education in practice. This raises a fundamental question about the relationship between symbolic recognition and substantive equality in access to education. As a result, the Slovak education system continues to reflect a tension between declared tolerance and persistent structural inequalities.

The Ministry of Education’s own data further confirms that the quality of education in segregated schools is generally low. Schools at risk of segregation consistently show worse outcomes. Roma pupils are more likely to repeat grades, less likely to progress to higher levels of education, and more likely to be taught by unqualified staff. Yet even these findings have not led to the adoption of concrete methodological, financial or staffing measures that would enable schools to reverse this long-standing negative trend.

Slovakia now has extensive evidence of the existence of segregation of Roma children in education. Its existence is no longer in dispute. The fact that the Ministry of Education has recently begun to openly acknowledge this issue at an official level is an important step. The coming years will show whether it can move beyond recognition and implement systematic, effective measures capable of eliminating discrimination against Roma children and strengthening the equality of the education system.

Caption: Interior of container school for Roma children in Slovakia.