The Italian parental participation at school is normatively regulated into formal categories by the Delegated Decrees of the 1974 Year. The involvement of parents is not direct but representatives. The main tools of parental involvement are the collegial boards of school. However by time, there has been an increasing participatory disaffection in education, as in other public policies, so that representatives parental participation has been perceived to be feeble. At the same time, both decentralization of national school system and the increased school autonomy contributed to increasingly introduce innovative problem-solving strategies in schools, to promote the more frequent involvement of stakeholder, and of parents in particular. Assuming that parental involvement is generally an educative process more informal and/or non formal than formal, the aim of this paper is to know how parental involvement is promoted in school. From the methodological viewpoint, the selection of a non probabilistic sample of qualified testimonials was done to define the concept of parental involvement at school. Stakeholders were selected considering macro, meso and micro stages of decision making on educational policy. In addition to the interviews, the participant observations of formal and non formal meetings between parents and school operators were undertaken in some primary and middle schools of the municipality of Genoa. Successively, a parent survey has been done selecting a non probabilistic sample of six hundred parents at the primary and middle level of the school system of the Genoese municipality. The main findings are presented in the form of descriptive analysis.
