Summer centres, funds stabilised but tight timeframe and limited resources

The long summer school break is just around the corner and municipalities are inviting families to apply for summer camps. These days registrations are open in Turin, Bologna, Monza, Cesena and many other cities. Milan, on the other hand, has already closed those for primary school students on 7 April and on the dedicated web page, where the final rankings will soon be published, there is an important warning: "The high number of requests received will not allow the opening of late bookings". For those who did not make it in time, in practice, there remains only the private offer: hundreds of initiatives, from oratories to bilingual camps, but with often unaffordable rates.

This opens the race to the summer centres for many families (there are 3.5 million students between kindergarten and primary school). In 2025 the Adoc-Eures study had mapped the costs of some 200 initiatives in eight major Italian cities and the average expenditure for a full-time summer centre stood at 173 euro per week, with the northern cities most expensive (Milan in particular). 'Italia,' explains Anna Rea, president of Adoc, 'is one of the few European countries where schools go on holiday for three full months. The management of this period and these figures become unsustainable for many families'.

In the meantime, municipalities have already planned the offer, thanks to the stabilisation of the National Fund for Social-Educational Activities in favour of minors, which from 2026 ensures local authorities 60 million euro for initiatives aimed at minors between 1 June and 31 December (Article 1, paragraphs 222-223, Law 199/2025).

The certainty of committed funds when fully operational facilitates the planning of local authorities, but the timing of the disbursement of public resources - stopped at 60 million a year for the past five years - still does not allow administrations to really enhance the offer. The go-ahead at the State-Cities and Local Authorities Conference for the draft decree of the Minister for the Family, Childbirth and Equal Opportunities, which defines the criteria for allocating funds for 2026, arrived on 9 April. The ministry's offices let it be known that, once the binding opinion of the MEF has been obtained (which should arrive in a few days), the online procedure will be opened to collect expressions of interest from municipalities, which is necessary to avoid the waste of resources allocated to entities that do not develop initiatives. This year, the process can be started quickly, even before the formal approval of the Court of Auditors to the distribution decree, precisely because they have been allocated at full speed.

The municipalities have welcomedthe stabilisation of the national fund: in the past, resources had to be identified every year and the request for renewal of the economic commitment forced the administrations to budget for summer initiatives without certainty. The Family Department is also working to further increase the funds: it is not excluded that new resources, deriving from residues from previous years, could be added to the 60 million.