Education: the ITS Academy model is making its mark in Europe too (following on from Africa and South America)

Following on from Africa, with the Mattei Plan, and South America, with Argentina, the all-Italian ITS Academy model is taking Europe by storm. For the first time, on Wednesday 11 November, led by the Minister for Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, and by the Vice-President of Confindustria for Education and Open Innovation, Riccardo Di Stefano, a large delegation from the ITS Academies, led by the president of the national network, Guido Torrielli, will be in Brussels as guests of the European Parliament.

The reason is simple: higher technological education is expanding worldwide and, thanks to the results achieved, is attracting many non-EU talents to Europe, proving to be a practical means of bringing skills to where businesses need them. There is also, probably, another reason: the effective use of European resources. Thanks to the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), enrolment at ITSs has risen from 9,000 to 41,000 in five years, with thousands of state-of-the-art laboratories being refurbished (or, in many cases, built from scratch) to make the training provision even more effective. For Minister Valditara, the ITS ‘are one of the finest challenges Italia has overcome; this type of training offers real prospects to young people and supports the growth and innovation of the manufacturing sector’.

The ITS members will be welcomed and listened to by MPs from across the political spectrum, ranging from Carlo Fidanza to Nicola Zingaretti, and from Pasquale Tridico to Elena Donazzan and Elisabetta Gualmini.

In reality, ITS Academies are not just one of the many forms of vocational tertiary education available in the Member States. They have a distinctive feature, however: the role played by businesses. In fact, companies do not merely identify skills requirements: they sit on the governing bodies of the Foundations, design the courses, teach in the classroom and welcome students into their production processes. There is also a less visible, but equally important, effect: businesses learn by teaching. Over the two-year training period, passing on their knowledge to students leads companies to clarify, review and often improve their own production and organisational processes. In short, the ITS becomes ‘a place of innovation for the business itself’.

The mission to Brussels is crucial for two reasons. The first concerns the technological and vocational education pathway – the 4+2 model, now enshrined in the education system – where the ‘+2’ refers precisely to the ITS Academies. In this way, the ITS model ‘enters’ technical and vocational colleges through the front door, bringing the logic of Higher VET into VET itself. The second, and perhaps most important, reason concerns Europe itself. In the wake of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), which is drawing to a close, it is essential to continue investing in ITSs and, more generally, in the integration of education and work. This requires not only domestic funding but also a substantial EU ‘boost’.