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.

The institutional definition of school dropout only partially captures the breadth of its implications and consequences. While it is generally understood as the lack or irregular use of education and training services during school age, the phenomenon in practice reflects the interaction of individual, familial, social, political, economic, and territorial factors. Moreover, the long-term consequences of high dropout rates are often underestimated, despite their systemic effects on individuals, social cohesion, and economic development.

This raises a key question: is school dropout primarily a matter of educational system performance, or does it entail broader political implications?

Drawing on empirical evidence collected in Rome’s Municipality VI through the project BELLA! Fateci spazio, coordinated by ActionAid Italy in partnership with local organizations and in collaboration with IREF, this paper examines the structural conditions that reproduce educational disadvantage in peripheral urban contexts. These areas are characterized by multidimensional poverty and by vulnerabilities that increase the likelihood of the intergenerational transmission of educational inequality.

Based on an integrated set of quantitative and qualitative data, the analysis explores how the local configuration of policies and institutional arrangements can either mitigate or reinforce existing inequalities. Within this framework, early school leaving is interpreted not simply as an individual or family outcome, but as the manifestation of broader mechanisms of social and territorial inequality that traverse educational institutions and local communities.

Through a cross-cutting analysis of interventions implemented in contexts of vulnerability and marginality, the paper proposes a broader operational understanding of early school leaving that accounts for its causes, reinforcing and mitigating factors, and long-term consequences. By doing so, it seeks to reposition the issue within a political perspective that acknowledges the central role of educational inequalities, moving beyond a purely technical or administrative approach.

Finally, the discussion highlights the relationship between community dynamics and educational processes, emphasizing the need for integrated, high-impact public policies aimed at prevention and at the progressive construction of an education system approaching the goal of “zero dropout”.

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.

Space plays a key role in shaping individual life trajectories at least at two distinct levels: as an endowment of resources (structural, institutional, and in terms of social capital), and as a context that generates aspirations, worldviews, and specific modes of action. Addressing the role of space in relation to educational careers raises a further challenge, situated at the intersection between emancipation from one’s place of origin—primarily an individual process—and the transformation of those places, which instead has a collective dimension. Establishing a hierarchy between these two levels is implicitly moralizing.

The BELLA! project appropriately seeks to engage with all these dimensions—not out of strategic ambiguity, but precisely because it seems impossible to commit to the improvement of neighbourhoods without simultaneously enabling young residents to test themselves beyond their immediate contexts. Likewise, it seems impossible to foster innovation within local communities without at the same time strengthening their cohesion.

The guiding theme of this roundtable discussion builds on this intuition in order to reflect on public policy. What enabling policies can foster change in complex contexts? How can we manage the complexity of acting on multiple fronts, where coordination and synergy across different sectors are required?

More specifically:

• Marco Rossi-Doria, currently President of Con i Bambini, formerly a “street teacher” and a pioneer of various “second-chance school” initiatives, will be invited to reflect on how schools must change structurally in order to fulfil their mandate of removing obstacles to equality, and on how territorial contexts can contribute to—rather than hinder—this transformation.
• Giuseppina Jose Mangione (INDIRE), researcher and head of units on organizational models, methodologies, and curriculum, as well as coordinator of innovation networks (Avanguardie Educative, Small Schools), will be asked to address the role of the school as a civic hub radiating educational opportunities at the local level, and to consider which other public policies are required to support such a role.
• Katia Scannavini, Co–Secretary General of ActionAid Italia will be invited to speak on the role of the third sector in relation to public policies.
• Fabrizio Barca, economist and former Minister for Territorial Cohesion, currently co-coordinator of the Forum for Inequalities and Diversity (ForumDD), will be prompted to reflect on the “politics of place” and on how to weave together different policy domains in an integrated approach.