The educational system in Sweden has changed from being one of the world’s most government dominated and unified, to one with a high level of freedom of choice. The overall aim of this paper is to explore the interplay between the choice-of-school policy, and the process of integration and segregation on a school level. Empirically, official geo-referenced register data is used in a GIS-based geographical analysis, where the simulated catchment areas (Voronie-technique) together with the pupils’ housing coordinates show the number of pupils who live near a school, and yet choose a school in a different area. By connecting each individual to a set of socioeconomic data, we analyse how the choice-of-school policy affects the schools’ ethnic and socioeconomic make-up of pupils, in the town of Örebro in central Sweden.

Assisted by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of capital and Torsten Hägerstrand’s time geography, the paper discuss the driving forces behind a pupil’s choice of school. The two approaches are combined to find a theoretical basis on which to interpret how individual factors manifest themselves within space, i.e. connecting the social space with the physical time space.

The analysis shows that the ethnic and social differences between the secondary levels of compulsory school in Örebro are increasing. The ethnic segregation did not become clear until towards the end of the 1990s. The free choice of school contributes to the segregation between schools, as the make-up of pupils in schools in disadvantaged and in privileged areas becomes more ethnically and socioeconomically homogenous. Families with resources can then be seen to avoid the local school in favour of others, and it is mostly pupils with a Swedish background who choose other schools. There is therefore reason to view this development as a “White Flight” phenomenon.