Conference Program

School guidance represents a fundamental component of lifelong guidance. It is crucial not only because it shapes decisions that significantly affect individuals’ educational and professional trajectories, but also because it contributes to the development of career management skills that accompany individuals throughout their lives.

From a capability approach perspective, guidance should not be understood merely as the provision of information or as support for matching individuals to existing educational and labour market opportunities. Rather, it plays a key role in expanding young people’s real freedoms—their capabilities—to aspire, to choose among meaningful alternatives, and to pursue lives they have reason to value. In this sense, guidance is deeply intertwined with issues of social justice: unequal access to quality guidance may translate into unequal capabilities, thereby reproducing or amplifying existing social inequalities.

Both informal guidance—occurring within families and everyday social environments—and formal guidance—primarily delivered by schools and other institutional actors—play a decisive role in shaping young people’s choices. However, school-based guidance is the domain most directly influenced by public policy. As such, it constitutes a key lever for either mitigating or, conversely, reproducing social inequalities.

In recent years, school guidance has regained prominence in Italian public policy. Notable examples include the 2022 National Guidelines on Guidance, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) Investment 1.4 on educational inequalities (“PNRR/divari”), and the introduction and subsequent regulatory revisions of school-to-work pathways. Despite this renewed policy attention, school guidance remains insufficiently monitored. There is a lack of systematic evaluation frameworks based on clearly defined process and outcome indicators capable of assessing both the implementation of guidance practices and their effects.

This contribution seeks to address this gap by providing an overview of guidance activities in Italian schools and the processes underpinning them. The analysis draws on two complementary sources: (1) administrative data from schools’ Self-Evaluation Reports (Rapporto di Auto Valutazione), and (2) survey data from a sample of over 1,500 teachers who responded to a questionnaire specifically focused on guidance practices. The survey data also offer valuable insights into teachers’ perceptions of guidance, which are crucial for understanding how guidance is implemented in practice—sometimes implicitly or unintentionally.

The findings highlight areas where knowledge remains limited and where further research is particularly needed. They also provide a basis for proposing policy directions aimed at strengthening school guidance and fostering greater integration between school guidance, school-to-work transition measures, and guidance in later stages of life. In doing so, the paper contributes to the broader debate on how to design integrated lifelong guidance policies capable of reducing social inequalities.