School leaders: 'OK to sponsors at school but with code of ethics'

Sponsors in schools have already entered almost 10 years ago with the 'Good School' of the then Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, but the Ministry of Education now wants to fine-tune the system and does so by sending institutes a note asking them to express, by 31 May, comments and suggestions on the assignment of sponsorship contacts in schools. Trade unions and associations that gravitate around the world of education do not disdain - in general terms - the entry of private individuals, but ask for safeguards, starting with a code of ethics that avoids forms of commercialisation and the Far West in general. "Sponsorships," reads the note from the ministry in Viale Trastevere to school leaders, "constitute a source of additional funding for educational institutions compared to those of a public nature and represent a concrete opportunity to improve the educational offer. The use of differentiated forms of funding, including sponsorship, is, in fact, one of the twenty objectives of the three-year plan for simplification in the school sector'.

The perplexity of many, however, is that some areas of the country will remain penalised, but the Ministry of Education reassures that there will be a compensatory fund for disadvantaged areas. "It seems to us that by this road we want to determine further divisions between schools and schools as well as between territories, we do not need this," notes polemically Gianna Fracassi, secretary general of Flc CGIL. On the same line is Giuseppe d'Aprile's Uil. 'The schools in the South,' he notes, 'risk suffering much more than those in the North, because when we talk about alliances with business, when we talk about co-financing, we have to ask ourselves where are, in the South, the businesses willing to give money to the schools'.
According to Ivana Barbacci (CISL scuola), "the public school must be adequately and stably financed by public resources, then the school autonomy has always allowed private contributions to support projects of particular interest, optional and optional as an extension of the educational offer".
Also for the Snals Confsal there is "the possibility that sponsorship can determine different quality levels of the teaching service because of the contexts to which the schools belong, worsening the gaps between schools belonging to different territories and between different schools, in relation to the different levels of interest of private individuals".

In favour, on the other hand, are the headmasters of ANP: 'I have already activated several sponsorships for almost 10 years,' points out Cristina Costarelli, headmaster of the Newton scientific high school in Rome, and her colleague Mario Rusconi, who heads the Rome-based union, says that 'companies that intervene in a positive way are good for the school, which always needs funds, so welcome, provided,' he points out, 'that there is an organisational and ethical code of sponsorships. Presumably the guidelines will be in place for the start of the next school year.