Italian schools, reloaded. 4 priorities to go beyond the coronavirus outbreak
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As the Italian government ordered the closure of schools to contain the coronavirus outbreak throughout the country, the many gaps preventing Italian students and teachers from learning online showed up all at once.
All of a sudden, amidst great uncertainty, any school activity has been stopped, while parents are finding it hard to deal with the situation. As schools are tackling the administrative consequences of this shock — Will the school year end be postponed? Will the final exams take place or not? — teachers and principals are trying to improvise e-learning activities that were never planned, tested or integrated within the schools’ internal processes.
As in any crisis, the many constraints that schools face today are enabling bottom up innovation, while teachers and students are showing the best of their skills to overcome the difficulties. However, nobody in his right mind would dare to affirm that the Italian education system as a whole is ready to face the future.
Will this crisis help the country to face those gaps and move forward? Here are four challenges ahead of us. If we don’t win them, bottom up innovations will never succeed.
1. It’s time to foster public investments in education
According to the OECD, education spending per student from primary to post-secondary schools in Italy amounts to 8,966 USD per year, well behind the U.S. (12,424), Korea (11,688), Sweden (11,502), the U.K. (11,028), Germany (10,863), Australia (10,766), Canada (10,468), Japan (10,167) and Finland (10,025).
Italian schools have been hit by public spending cuts for decades, a systemic lack of resources which in December 2019 led the Education Minister, Lorenzo Fioramonti, to hand in his resignations. However, the amount of money spent for education is just the visible side of the Moon: how this money might be spent is indeed far more important.
Since most of Italian schools were built more than 40 years ago, many need heavy physical investments: according to a study by Fondazione Agnelli, 200 billion euros (11% of the Italian GPD) would be needed to refurbish 40,000 school buildings. In other terms, 1,300 euros should be spent for each square meter to make Italian schools fit for the future.
In terms of digital infrastructure the Italian education system is outdated and lags well behind many European countries. In Italy, where mobile devices have always been more popular than personal computers, today it is not rare to find schools where computer labs are not working and sheets of papers are hanging on electronic whiteboards.
Actually, several programmes have been developed to foster the digitalisation of schools. Fondazione per la Scuola, for instance, developed from Turin a programme — Riconnessioni — aimed at bringing together teachers, headteachers, parents and students to build the school of the future, involving hundreds of schools in North West Italy.
2. It’s time to make being a teacher a better job
However, in order to produce a systemic impact on the education system, the Italian Government should make treasure of the few best practices and scale them up. In 2015 a reform law — la “Buona Scuola” — established a Digital School National Plan, to innovate the education system and foster digital education.
It turned out badly, with strong resistances to change from the school trade unions and poor results in terms of career opportunities. Here actually comes an element of great weakness. Italian teachers suffer from job instability: about 150,000 (17%) are on ‘temporary’ jobs, a condition which usually lasts for many years or decades. At the same time, even if we don’t take fiscal pressure into account, teachers in Italy are rewarded with low wages and their income, if compared with other countries, doesn’t grow enough along their career.
Given this mix of ingredients, it shouldn’t be surprising that PISA tests are often felt by Italian teachers as if they were a threat to their working positions, while students usually score poor results when compared to their peers abroad. According to the OECD, indeed:
In 2018, Italy scored below the OECD average in reading and science, and around the OECD average in mathematics. Mean performance in Italy declined, after 2012, in reading and science, and remained stable (and above the level observed in 2003 and 2006) in mathematics. Reading performance declined, in particular, amongst girls (and remained stable among boys). Science performance declined most markedly amongst the highest-achieving students, by a similar amount for both boys and girls.
In spite of this, Italy can still rely on a very consistent and locally managed network of kindergartens (the Reggio Emilia model is a worldwide benchmark, for instance) and on a solid network of high quality primary schools. But it stands as a clear issue the fact that once they begin teaching, Italian teachers are left alone for decades. As a matter of fact, they’re prevented from studying and committing part of their job to deepen the study of pedagogy and soft skills, unless they do it at their own expense and during their free time.
3. It’s time to open up the Italian education system
Poor investments + old premises + poor digital infrastructure + poorly paid teachers turn out to be a toxic mix when you realise that, in spite of the several reforms put into practice during the recent decades, the Italian school and its curricula still rely deeply on a framework which was set in 1923 by the idealistic philosopher Giovanni Gentile, according to which what teachers know determines how students learn (notwithstanding who the learner is), instead of a more advanced pedagogical approach where how students learn determine how teachers teach (and what teachers should learn as well, while students attitudes and background change through years).
All the more reasons, after 1968, the baby boom and mass education established a public education system closed towards internal and external entrepreneurship. An education system which is publicly funded, but which — as a matter of fact — has been always betrayed by the public administration. In Finland, for instance, where schools are fully financed by the Government and students and families don’t pay almost anything or nothing for child and teen education, entrepreneurship is taught to primary school kids and, at the same time, several teachers and school principals are often education entrepreneurs, a personal background which helps them to foster innovation at school.
In Italy, a country where social and cultural innovation has a strong bottom up consistency, thousands of good practices born in schools struggle to replicate themselves in other schools, while it’s very unlikely that they might scale across the education system or turn into small education companies.
In 2016 the Education Ministry was able to build a Safer Internet Centre collecting bottom up good practices for schools, but teacher and education entrepreneurship is still a huge issue in Italy, with few initiatives in place to foster it. Amongst the others, it is here worth to mention a few that are doing a great job on that: Future Education Modena, H-Farm Education, Nesta Italia and Social Fare.
4. It’s time to build a learning innovation ecosystem
However, the key element which makes Italy late if compared with many Northern European countries — from Denmark to Estonia, from Germany to the U.K., from Finland to Sweden — is the absence of a learning innovation ecosystem, enabling schools, universities, local administrations, edtech startups and education companies, angel and venture investors, to work together in order to make education keep the pace of the future.
While large tech players are stepping in to provide schools with infrastructure and software services to retain students as prospective long term customers, small businesses struggle to develop a standardised offer of products for schools, higher education, VET and life long learning. Schools, indeed, are not only unable to buy digital and e-learning products, but they also lack of any internal process needed to introduce them at school.
Here again, the Nordic countries come in handy as a useful benchmark. In Finland and Scandinavia edtech startups still struggle to survive, but several digital gateway platforms — such as Skolon or Visma — began to provide schools with a full range of edtech solutions, often integrated within the school register or the internal cloud. At the same time, these countries are far ahead in providing each student with a school pc or in enabling them to rely on their own personal digital devices to make use of edtech solutions at school.
To cut the long story short, for Italy it’s now or never
Innovation in education is just ‘nice to have’ until you realise that if you don’t implement it the education system sooner or later will collapse. The coronavirus outbreak is not the source of our problems, it is an event which makes us see how deep our problems are.
Without a strong, well funded, open and up to date education system the conditions which in the XX Century enabled Italy to become one of the largest economies in the world will fade.
At the same time, this crisis established unprecedented conditions to innovate the Italian Education system and, in spite of political instability, the country has now the chance to put into practice article 34 of the Italian Constitution, which states that: Capable and deserving pupils, including those lacking financial resources, have the right to attain the highest levels of education.
If we speak of education, however, the coronavirus outbreak is as well an alarm bell for local institutions, corporate companies, financial institutions, charities and foundations, business angels, venture investors and private actors who care about the future.
The Government has now the chance to foster investments in education and work to make being a teacher a better job, but every actor available in the field has to take its share of the challenge to open the education system and to build a learning innovation ecosystem in Italy.
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You can read this post in Italian, you will find it here on Medium.
