Conference Program

Within a broader European shift toward work-based learning centred on key competences and lifelong guidance, Italy’s PCTO (Percorsi per le Competenze Trasversali e per l’Orientamento - starting from the 2025/26 school year School-to-Work Training FSL) reframes school-to-work programs around transversal competences, orientation and the governance of the partnerships among school, host institution and other stakeholders. With this contribution, we aim to reconstruct how that frame is interpreted in practice and how it shapes the distribution of learning and work opportunities from the point of view of host structures. The study is part of broader national research on PCTO; we draw our evidence from 27 interviews with key informants and host tutors and a two-stage email survey targeting host tutors (2022–2023. N=356).

First, we observe a gap between formal alignment with the aspirations of PCTOs and their implementation. Overall, host tutors agree on the centrality of transversal competences and orientation, yet implementation diverges systematically across host organisations. Some organisations, often public/third-sector, cultural or research-oriented, tend to conform more easily and consistently to the transversal competences frame, whereas projects hosted by businesses, especially in Italy’s SME-dominated economy, tend to remain geared toward technical training and job-specific skills. This is not simply a matter of preferences or stiffness: it reflects tensions between educational expectations and the organisational constraints of the Italian economic fabric. Case-by-case adaptations generate sharp heterogeneity in project quality and learning outcomes. The reform reduces project hours and widens a divide between host organisations that can easily align with students’ and families’ expectations and the policy’s broader goals, and less structured organisations, especially micro and small firms, whose technically oriented training becomes less effective when squeezed into shorter timeframes. The result is a two-speed PCTO system that reproduces school segregation and educational inequalities within the host structures.

Second, PCTO guidelines call for integrated cooperation between schools and host organisations, as the main driver for customisation and the overall quality of the projects delivered. However, our evidence shows that fully collaborative coordination is relatively rare. Most projects are governed through fragmented or partially integrated arrangements, where responsibilities for design and monitoring are unevenly shared and interactions between tutors are intermittent. Importantly, integrated coordination is less explained by sector, territory, or organisational size per se than by internal organisational conditions, such as strong support, time and capacity to sustain the coordination work required for partnership.

Finally, we highlight how contextual factors such as relational and experiential capital, (e.g accumulated organisational experience with PCTO, pre-existing networks) shape also the likelihood of post-PCTO work-related collaborations. Where internal support is scarce, organisational constraints are tight and host structures have less experience in PCTOs, partnerships tend to remain episodic and reactive; where resources, capacity and networks exist, PCTOs are successful. In this sense, the policy tends to presuppose, rather than build, the organisational and relational conditions needed, struggling to challenge pre-existing inequalities and school segregation, but rather mirroring within host structures.