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.

Can an active citizenship programme — not originally designed to facilitate school-to-work transitions — produce significant effects on young people’s employability? While school-to-work programs (SWP) are increasingly central to educational and labor policy, their evaluations tend to focus primarily on process outcomes and immediate behavioral changes, often overlooking longitudinal results as well as the dimensions of justice, recognition, and voice that define their democratic potential. The case of the Italian Universal Civil Service (SCU) offers key insights that can enrich this analytical framework.

INAPP surveys indicate that volunteers’ employability increases by an average of 12% following their service experience, across gender, educational attainment, geographical area, and family background—suggesting an effect that is widespread and relatively independent of initial conditions. Furthermore, among young people who simultaneously exhibit high levels of both employability and active citizenship, the employment rate reaches 73.7%, compared to an overall average of 57.2%.

These findings stem from a research programme aimed at investigating the extent to which higher employability may reflect a more conscious and practiced form of citizenship, moving beyond the dominant paradigm that identifies education and training as the sole relevant drivers of active labour market policies. Through the use of two original indices — OKI-INAPP for employability and ACCI-INAPP for active citizenship — the research provides evidence that appears to support this hypothesis.

By integrating these findings with the capability approach (Sen, 1999; Nussbaum, 2011) and the framework proposed in the volume School-to-Work Programs: an Opportunity for Social Justice?, this paper interprets the SCU as a potential conversion factor capable of transforming institutional resources into substantive freedoms and real opportunities. Although not a transition programme in the strict sense, the SCU produces systemic effects on both the probability of labour market entry and civic agency, proving to be a highly relevant empirical laboratory for questioning dominant evaluative criteria.

From this perspective, the paper raises two main issues. First, it advances the hypothesis that integrating civic and relational dimensions into transition pathways may strengthen employability rather than divert resources from it: if a citizenship programme produces employment as an indirect outcome, policies that ignore this dimension may be based on a partial representation of the phenomenon. Second, it proposes an impact measurement framework based on the OKI and ACCI indices, capable of making visible dimensions — such as active citizenship — that current evaluative approaches tend to overlook. In doing so, it contributes to the development of more comprehensive tools for assessing whether school-to-work programmes truly expand the substantive freedoms and civic agency of participating youth.

Starting in the 2025/26 school year, the programs for transversal skills and orientation (PCTO), established by Law 145/2018, have been reformulated as “School-to-Work Training” (Decree No. 127 of September 9, 2025). According to the technical report of the Ministry of Education, the reform aims to strengthen the connection between school-to-work experiences, educational processes, and students’ concrete needs. The new framework refers to a perspective centred on students’ personal and social development and encourages forms of self-assessment accompanied by verification and documentation.Between the previous regulatory framework and the new configuration—on which public policy debate remains limited—lies the broader perspective of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). Within Mission 4, Component 1(Strengthening the Offering of Educational Services),six reforms are envisaged. Two of them are particularly relevant to the reconfiguration of the school–work relationship: the reform of Technical and Vocational Institutes and the Orientation Reform(Ministerial Decree No. 328/2022). Law 22/2025 further emphasizes the development of non-cognitive and transversal skills as key outcomes to be fostered through school-to-work training.Overall, this policy framework aims to promote equity, social cohesion, and students’ capacity for self-orientation(Life Design), fostering interaction between learning processes and socio-relational development across upper secondary education, with particular attention to technical institutes currently undergoing reform.

Within this scenario, the introduction of Educational Agreements 4.0—conceived as a support structure for designing and implementing school-to-work programs—suggests possible connections between democratic forms of student development and work environments characterized by participatory organizational cultures, on-the-job learning, and shared responsibility. However, beyond policy expectations, a gap emerges between legislative objectives and stakeholders’ perceptions. Exploratory work conducted by several Regional School Offices, including Liguria, indicates that many internal tutor teachers and school principals do not always demonstrate a clear understanding of the systemic links among the different regulatory components. Some stakeholders call for stronger central coordination to clarify the relationship between regulatory innovation and implementation contexts.Only a limited number of schools—mainly technical institutes, sometimes connected to ITS foundations—show more integrated practices, including international mobility experiences linked to STEM and multilingualism and collaboration between orientation tutors, counsellors, and teachers responsible for school-to-work programs.More encouraging insights emerge from focus groups conducted with students from technical and vocational institutes and from an art high school in Western Liguria. Students highlight the role of host organizations in shaping their life projects, the importance of supportive workplace teams, the learning value of mistakes and unexpected situations, and the development of relational competences. Keywords used to describe these experiences include awareness, change, immersion, group, growth, and effectiveness.

A shared critical issue concerns the Student Digital Portfolio (e-Portfolio) on the Unica ministerial platform, designed to support orientation and collaboration among school stakeholders. At present, the platform does not allow students to carry out structured self-assessment of their school-to-work experiences. Finally, international mobility programs raise additional concerns: participants are often selected based on high academic achievement, limiting wider access, while the mediation of private agencies can reduce the educational value of these experiences and weaken the role of school communities.

School-to-Work Programs (SWPs) are widely promoted as policy instruments to support students’ orientation and skill development during upper secondary education (Vermeire, De Cuyper, Kyndt, 2022). Beyond organisational arrangements and short-term outcomes, students’ experiences and levels of awareness provide evaluative evidence for examining how School-to-Work Programs are implemented in schools. From an evaluative perspective, students’ accounts and levels of awareness constitute a crucial source of evidence for assessing the quality and coherence of SWP implementation.

This paper analyses students’ perspectives on SWPs in the Italian context by focusing on information, guidance, and choice. Drawing on student voice as an evaluative lens (Esposito, Galeotti, 2018), the study explores how students assess the functions of SWPs, how informed they feel about key aspects of these pathways, and which actors they identify as central in guiding their choices, in line with recent research on PCTOs and orientation in secondary education (Germani, Marini, Stanzione, 2025).

The analysis is based on the first wave of a broader longitudinal study conducted within a national PRIN project. Data were collected through a CAWI survey administered in the 2021–2022 school year to 4,045 students enrolled in 78 Italian upper secondary schools. The sample includes students attending academic (49.6%), technical (36.8%), and vocational (13.6%) tracks, with 1,871 males (46.2%) and 2,174 females (53.8%). The questionnaire investigated students’ evaluations of SWPs’ functions, sources and clarity of information, participation in training activities, and awareness of certification procedures.

Overall, students express positive evaluations of SWPs, primarily viewing them as opportunities to become familiar with the world of work, test personal abilities, and support future educational or career choices. Perceived usefulness is generally high, with students enrolled in vocational tracks reporting more favourable assessments than their peers in academic and technical pathways. However, these positive evaluations coexist with moderate levels of self-reported awareness. On a scale from 1 to 10, students’ perceived level of information averages 6.84, with fewer than 40% considering themselves well or fully informed.

Although more than 97% of students report having participated in informational sessions, these activities tend to focus mainly on organisational aspects, while issues related to tutoring roles and certification procedures are less clearly understood. Nearly 15% of students report being unaware of the existence of a final certification, and among those who expect to receive one, a substantial proportion express uncertainty about how competences will be certified.

Students identify the school as the primary context guiding their choices. Teachers, educational tutors, company tutors, and peers play a pivotal role in mediating information and supporting decision-making (Poliandri, Graziosi, Epifani, 2025), whereas advice from families or external actors appears marginal. Differences across educational tracks persist, with vocational students reporting higher levels of information and guidance.

By foregrounding students’ perspectives, the study highlights how high expectations towards SWPs coexist with information gaps that may affect orientation and recognition processes. These findings suggest that strengthening clarity, guidance, and transparency—particularly regarding tutoring roles and certification—represents a key evaluative issue for ensuring that SWPs effectively support informed choices and equitable opportunities across educational pathways.

For decades, guidance has been framed as a strategic lever of educational policy, intended to prevent school delay and dropout, foster academic success, and align schooling with active labour market measures. Within this policy architecture, School-to-Work programs have been consolidated as structural devices designed to accompany students in constructing informed educational and professional trajectories.

Yet a persistent paradox underlies these initiatives: although students are their primary addressees, they are seldom involved in their design, evaluation, or reflective re-elaboration. Currently configured in Italy as Formazione Scuola-Lavoro (FSL), formerly PCTO, these pathways risk functioning as hetero-directed dispositifs in which aims, contents, and methodologies are predominantly defined by adults, while young people occupy a largely receptive role. Such a configuration appears particularly problematic if guidance is understood as a process aimed at strengthening agency, autonomy, and the capacity to attribute meaning to one’s own future. Marginalizing students’ voices may therefore undermine the emancipatory potential that guidance policies explicitly seek to promote.

This contribution draws on findings from the PRIN 2022 research project (Stanzione, 2025; Truffelli, Stanzione, Pagani, in press), which—grounded in the Student Voice framework and its conception of listening as both a democratic imperative and a driver of educational improvement—adopted a mixed-method design. The study involved 297 students across five Italian secondary schools in qualitative focus groups and collected survey data from 1,575 students, allowing for an integrated analysis of lived experiences and broader trends. By foregrounding their perspectives, the paper critically reinterprets School-to-Work programs through the voices of those most directly concerned yet often excluded from governance processes.

Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative evidence, the contribution reflects on how limited student involvement can constrain recognition, agency, and meaningful participation. Conversely, when students are acknowledged as legitimate co-constructors of their pathways, School-to-Work programs are more likely to operate as emancipatory spaces that expand capabilities, foster reflexivity, and contribute to more socially just educational trajectories.