Educational crisis plans: explaining access and skill formation policies in Italy (1996- 2023)

This study considers the politics of education policy-making regarding access and skill formation in upper secondary education in Italy, examining access and skill-formation policies both at national level (such as formative/school duty regulations; tracking regulations; school guidance policies; curricula) and at regional level (such as school sizing regulations and educational offer). The scope for intervention in aiding transition to higher education and the labour market, while also addressing skills shortages can be clarified if a light is shed on the underlying policy-making dynamics, exiting a constant perceived situation of educational crisis in the public debate around the Italian system. However, in the Italian context, the ex-education Minister Berlinguer, as reported in the Education Annals of 1997, noticed how until then no substantive intervention had been devoted to the critical point of “orientamento”- “school guidance policies”. According to the ex-Minister, who started a “revolution” in the school system triggering the autonomy reform, through which schools would gain more didactic and organizational autonomy, school guidance policies should be part of the curriculum as they were not just “informative”, but truly “formative”, to the extent that they had the potential to have each student reflecting on their own inclinations and hence choose the school pathway that would best suit them, a key feature of the Italian “integrated education system”. Embracing the timeframe 1996-2023, this study investigates the implementation of the afore-mentioned access and skill formation policies posing the research question: “What are the mechanisms underlying education policy access reforms/legislative interventions?”. Legislative interventions to be explained in the timeframe, range from law n.30/2000, the "cycles" reform containing initiatives on access and curricula, to the recent NRRP (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) education reforms foreseeing the introduction of mandatory hours devoted to school choice guidance/reflections in the curriculum. The research design first considers the national level. Applying Comparative Historical Analysis, throughout the main reforms of the scrutinized years, a section traces changes in the implementation of access and the intertwined skill-formation policies, evidencing a “dysfunctional mismatch” between the two. Namely, juxtaposing regulations on access (e.g. schooling/formative duty) with those on skill formation (e.g. tracking age, curricula) there are seldom reciprocal recalls that would ensure that a minimum curricular basis is shared among pupils, an identifying feature of the “integrated formative system” as highlighted by the pedagogical literature and by normative references, starting from the “Work Agreement” in 1996. The dysfunctional mismatch is then evidenced and connected to stakeholders’ discourses to skills shortages, and their relation is explored in the explanatory process tracing addressing the sub research question: “how is the dysfunctional mismatch between access and skill-formation policies created and sustained throughout the years?”. The second level is the regional one: in a multiple case study design with the Northern region of Emilia-Romagna, the Central Lazio and the Southern Campania, the skills shortage dynamics are highlighted in public remarks by the Regional Governors, and emerge when considering changing regulations on school sizing policies (access) and the local formative offer (skill formation), explained via process tracing.