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The literature on educational poverty has highlighted the multidimensional nature of inequalities in learning processes and the particularly high exposure to educational risks among minors who are not living with their family of origin, for whom relational continuity and access to protective resources constitute central factors in developmental trajectories. Within this framework, this contribution analyses the role of normative frames and value systems in the construction of educational vulnerabilities and in the activation of support resources, with particular attention to gender dynamics in educational decision-making processes.

The paper assumes that the assessment of educational difficulties is a process shaped by social representations of expected developmental standards and by culturally legitimised models of autonomy and individual success. From this perspective, the concept of bionormativity is used as an analytical lens to examine how such models may orient the interpretation of difficulties and the definition of educational interventions, potentially affecting the activation of protective resources in the trajectories of minors in out-of-home care contexts.

From an empirical standpoint, the contribution integrates two analytical strategies. First, it draws on secondary analyses of data from the European Social Survey Round 11 to examine the distribution of values related to self-assertion, social recognition, and gender roles in the European and Italian contexts. This analysis makes it possible to reconstruct value hierarchies and representations of individual autonomy that contribute to defining socially shared models of development and success, thereby outlining the cultural context within which educational processes and protective practices are situated.

Second, the contribution presents an exploratory study based on factorial vignettes administered to education professionals, aimed at observing the threshold for activating interventions and the perceived structural nature of school difficulties in equivalent situations, varying only the gender and relational context of the described profile. This design makes it possible to analyse whether, with the same level of difficulty, differences emerge in the intensity of educational responses and in the definition of protective resources.

The contribution therefore integrates structural and cultural dimensions in the analysis of educational poverty, highlighting how value systems and normative categories may shape the interpretation of vulnerability and the activation of protective factors in the educational trajectories of minors in conditions of particular fragility.