Conference Program

This contribution presents findings from a quantitative survey conducted within BELLA! Fateci spazio, promoted by ActionAid International Italia ETS and funded by Fondazione CDP, investigating early school leaving risk, educational transitions, and school well-being in Rome's Sixth Municipality, a large and densely populated peripheral district marked by significant socio-economic inequalities.

The study draws on an integrated theoretical framework combining structural and interactionist perspectives. Building on Bourdieu and Passeron's (1970) theory of social reproduction, Bernstein's (1975) analysis of pedagogic devices, and relational approaches to educational inequality (Barone, 2009; Van Zanten, 2009), school choice and dropout risk are conceptualized not as individual outcomes but as socially stratified processes embedded in symbolic dynamics that unfold within everyday school life. Dropout is accordingly understood as a structural manifestation of territorial injustice (Dubet, 2011), shaped by the micro-interactional processes through which institutional recognition — or its absence — constructs students' identities and aspirations (Honneth, 1995; Dubet & Martuccelli, 1996).

The empirical basis is a standardized questionnaire administered in autumn-winter 2025-2026 across final-year lower secondary and upper secondary classes in 12 schools, drawn from a universe of 28 institutions in the municipality. Over 2,000 students were sampled through a two-dimensional stratified design: the first variable captures early school leaving incidence among 18–24 year-olds by urban area, from ISTAT data on urban deprivation; the second captures school type and level. Weights reflect the ratio of target students per stratum to the total population.

Preliminary findings from 374 valid student responses are organized around the study's two research axes. On the structural dimension, over a third of fathers hold at most a lower secondary diploma and 39% of students have at least one parent born outside Italy. Students with a migrant background are more than four times as likely to have repeated a school year (6.0% vs 1.3%, p<.05) — a direct indicator of dropout risk at the lower secondary transition. On the interactional dimension, three findings stand out. First, peer victimization is strikingly prevalent: 77% report at least one episode since the start of the year — most commonly social exclusion (41%) and offensive mockery (51%) — and it is significantly associated with lower school comfort (rho=−0.24, p<.001). Second, student-teacher relationship quality is the strongest predictor of both school comfort (rho=0.22) and satisfaction (rho=0.35, p<.001), and mediates guidance access: students perceiving supportive relationships are far more likely to discuss their future with teachers (3.99 vs 3.36, p<.001). Third, gender structures experience along two lines: female students report both greater future anxiety (55% vs 26%, p<.001) and higher perceived daily school difficulty (2.59 vs 2.36, p<.01) — a compounded, not merely transitional, disadvantage.

These patterns reveal a territory where relational quality — not socioeconomic composition alone — is the proximate factor shaping unequal trajectories. The findings engage a broader challenge: moving from an ethics of probability, in which futures are assigned by social position, toward an ethics of possibility (Appadurai, 2013), where expanding horizons of aspiration becomes itself an object of institutional effort.