Pnrr rebuilds 40 per cent of Italian schools: 9.3 billion for 14,178 interventions

The NRP aims to remake 40 per cent of Italian schools, with renovations designed in the name of earthquake safety, energy efficiency and the expansion of facilities and gyms. But building is only the most immediately perceptible of the many strands of intervention that the National Recovery and Resilience Plan dedicates to education, a chapter that collectively brings together 50,530 initiatives, or 16.5 per cent of the initiatives in the general census conducted through the unique project codes (Cup). These investments, with a cumulative value of 12.03 billion, in addition to the hardware represented by classrooms, canteens and gyms, also deal with school software, with 36,343 projects for the training, refresher and orientation of teachers and students, and with a small share of internships, apprenticeships and school-to-work alternation courses.

The one investigated by the new instalment of the 'Pnrr of things', the project conducted by Il Sole 24 Ore in collaboration with Ifel to examine the actual effects of the investments financed by the common European debt on the real lives of citizens and territories, is in short a crucial terrain in the panorama of the Plan. And it is also one of the closest to the strategic heart of the Next Generation EU, which, beyond the constant debates on milestones, targets, actual expenditure and the state of implementation, was created with an eye to the future in order to give countries, and first of all Italy, which is its main recipient, a structural legacy in terms of greater potential growth, and thus of improved human capital and its training. In a programme entitled 'Next Generation', after all, schools cannot but be a central pillar.

In the overall classification of projects, school building is actually in the minority, with its 14,178 interventions accounting for 28.06% of the total. The largest group is made up of initiatives dedicated to 'training and education within compulsory schooling', which deal with creating new training pathways, developing the digital skills of staff and students, improving orientation and launching inclusion programmes in the areas most affected by early school leaving. In total, there are 36,343 cases which, together with the 9 internship, apprenticeship and alternance projects, thus cover 71.94% of the projects. In economic terms, on the other hand, the supremacy of the building sector, i.e. the area in which the municipalities are the first implementers, becomes clear: its 9.39 billion investments account for 78.03% of the portfolio allocated by the NRP to the world of education.
In this field there are two strands: the adaptation and restoration works are 12,284 and are worth 5.33 billion In the pipeline, however, there is also the construction of 1,894 new schools, for 4.05 billion euro. Moral: if everything goes as it should, at the end of the plan Italy will have renovated or rebuilt from scratch 39.6% of the 35,822 public and private school buildings surveyed by the Single Data Portal managed by the Ministry of Education. Renovation work is worth an average of 434,000 euro, while building from scratch comes to 2.14 million each.

But hopefully energy-efficient walls, roofs and windows are only the indispensable prerequisite for education. Which needs a lot of fuel on the more intangible, but even more important, level of education and social inclusion. Here, the EUR 2.64 billion distributed among 36,343 initiatives (EUR 72,668 each), almost equally divided between teachers (51.45% of the projects are addressed to them) and students, reveal an impressive imaginative effort on the part of educational and territorial institutions to try to meet the needs deemed priorities in the various contexts. The picture is very rich, and basically impossible to summarise in general terms in a panorama that embraces all areas of the country and all levels of education.
For example, in Piedmont the Its Foundation for Information and Telecommunication Technology, active between Turin, Novara and Bra (province of Cuneo), has obtained 9.7 million euro for a broad carnet of individual and group orientation projects and for refresher courses for teachers and experts in the new technologies, with the aim of enhancing one of the most promising training offers in terms of employment today. In Apulia, on the other hand, the Its for sustainable mobility has a 6.2 million budget for the training of classes of students in the aerospace sector. While in Erice, in the province of Trapani, the Florio Institute has set up a EUR 387,000 initiative for the creation of teams of teachers trained in the prevention of early school leaving for young people at risk of dropping out. In school, in short, the NRP is trying to get everywhere: and before long, it will be time for the first results.