Conference Program

This contribution conceptualizes early school leaving (ESL) as a structurally produced and territorially embedded phenomenon rather than an individual deficiency or failure. Drawing on a place-based perspective (Gruenewald, 2003), educational inequalities are understood as spatially configured and institutionally mediated. Vulnerable territories thus emerge as arenas where social injustice is reproduced but can also be contested through reconfigured forms of educational governance.

Within this framework, the educational community is defined as a territorial infrastructure of shared educational responsibility. In line with UNESCO’s (2021) whole school approach, the school is conceived as a democratic public institution embedded in a broader civic ecosystem where public authorities, civil society organizations, families, and youth co-produce educational processes. This view resonates with theories of multi-level governance, which frame education policy as the outcome of negotiated interactions across institutional levels and between state and non-state actors. Governance, therefore, is relational and distributed rather than hierarchical. These issues will be addressed by the three speakers from their respective domains of expertise: Piccioli will focus on the role of the third sector and provide evidence on multi-level governance in territories with different characteristics, highlighting the responsibilities of each actor within the educational community; Pratelli will reflect on the role of local public policies and multi-level institutional coordination; and Neri will present empirical evidence of how community-based spaces can function as transformative devices.

At the school level, this paradigm is operationalized through distributed leadership (INDIRE, 2021). School improvement stems from collaborative professional agency and shared responsibility among principals, teachers, and the wider school community. Such leadership reinforces institutional autonomy while strengthening territorial embeddedness, enhancing schools’ capacity to act as mediating institutions within fragile contexts.

Educational alliances, often formalized through institutional agreements, institutionalize this cooperative governance. Rooted in shared administration and horizontal subsidiarity (Arena, 2015), they enable local authorities, schools, and third-sector actors to co-design educational and social interventions. Their formalization establishes accountable frameworks for resource allocation and collective responsibility, consistent with commons governance and collective action theory. Alliances thus reconfigure the relationship between public institutions and community actors, repositioning education as a shared territorial resource.

A defining dimension of the educational community is youth protagonism, framed through student and youth voice. Participation is treated as a structural component of democratic quality rather than symbolic inclusion. Research demonstrates that meaningful student involvement strengthens agency and belonging (Fielding, 2004; Cook-Sather, 2006). Lundy’s (2007) model—space, voice, audience, and influence—offers criteria for assessing whether alliances generate genuine decision-making power. Extending this lens to local governance, scholarship on youth participation stresses the importance of institutional conditions that prevent tokenism (Hart, 1992) and highlights the civic and policy benefits of youth engagement in local decision-making (Checkoway, 2011).

The role of local institutions is crucial in transforming alliances into stable public policy architectures. The experience of the Municipality of Rome, including Priority Educational Areas (IEP), illustrates how local governments can coordinate across sectors, integrate educational and social policies, and sustain territorial co-design processes. Local governance thus becomes a mediating arena capable of translating community needs into structural strategies for preventing ESL.

Finally, the case of Scaro Community in Agrigento exemplifies the development of an education hub in a peripheral Southern context, where urban regeneration evolves into territorial educational infrastructure. By intertwining formal and non-formal education, civic activism, and youth participation, the initiative demonstrates how community-based spaces can function as transformative devices. Local policies that strengthen formal youth participation bodies—such as youth councils—and connect them to educational governance processes are essential for embedding youth voice beyond school boundaries and consolidating participatory democratic practices at the territorial level.