Technical sixth-form colleges and ITS Academy: the school of innovation takes off

If this isn’t a revolution for the Italian school system, then it’s certainly not far off. We’re talking about the change in name for technical colleges (and vocational colleges too) set out in the ‘Scuola’ decree: from now on, technical colleges will be called ‘technological lyceums’. This is the final piece in a process that has seen, in order: the re-establishment, within the Ministry of Education and Merit, of the Directorate-General for Technical Education; the strengthening of the ITS Academies; and the creation of the new, innovative ‘technological-vocational’ training pathway, the 4+2 model (four years of upper secondary school plus two years at ITS), which has now become part of the official education system and is promoted by a dedicated body. This marks the emergence of a genuine ‘school of innovation’, introduced with courage and vision by Minister Giuseppe Valditara, overcoming over a century of neglect and the unfair, hasty labelling of these institutions as ‘second-class schools’.

The decision to refer to technical colleges as ‘technological secondary schools’ therefore goes beyond mere semantics and brings one of the most significant issues for the world of education back to the fore, namely ‘equal status among educational pathways’. Other countries have already taken steps in this direction, such as France, Germany and Switzerland, to name but a few. The distinction between ‘prestigious’ schools and ‘lower-ranking’ schools originated with the Casati Law of 1859, which reserved the path to university for classical grammar schools and relegated technical schools to a separate track for the trades. The Gentile reform of 1923 cemented this hierarchy. Curiously, the same reform also established the scientific secondary school, now the most popular in Italia, but which was originally conceived as an intermediate-level pathway. In the 1990s, the Brocca Commission proposed a ‘scientific-technological secondary school’ without Latin, which remained one of many experimental schemes until the Gelmini reorganisation of 2010 made it part of the official curriculum as the ‘Applied Sciences’ option.

Despite the formal recognition granted by Presidential Decree 275/1999, prejudice against technical (and vocational) students has persisted: enrolment in these institutions has continued to be viewed as a ‘fallback option’, reserved mainly for the children of less well-off families. Yet, our technical schools have always trained industrial experts, laboratory technicians, department heads and production managers who have built the strength of Italian manufacturing. Even today, a great many technical institutes bear the names of great entrepreneurs; and our technical education has also made its mark on the world. One need only look at the Don Bosco Institute in Cairo, which is now reportedly to be called a ‘technological secondary school’: this year marks the 100th anniversary of its founding, and it serves as a pedagogical model even for Egyptian universities, with students who graduate from there, learn Italian and come to Italia – often to our ITS Academies and companies such as Danieli.

It is against this backdrop that Valditara’s decree comes into play; by renaming technical (and vocational) schools, it brings things full circle, dismantling a centuries-old educational hierarchy: it aims to recognise the equal cultural and educational standing of these pathways, formally restoring the same symbolic weight to courses which, in practice, have always had equal legal standing, and highlighting their role in developing the skills required for the country’s innovation. A significant change of direction, therefore, for at least three reasons. Firstly, because of the economic impact. Today, the skills mismatch costs businesses around 44 billion, equivalent to 2.5 percentage points of GDP. Two in three businesses currently recruiting are struggling to find the necessary talent, from manufacturing to ICT, from energy to logistics, and so on. From this perspective, revitalising the image of technical pathways can help to reduce this ‘burden’. A second aspect is the political sphere, where the most immediate benefit is symbolic: removing the stigma that has made a technical education a ‘fallback’ choice could encourage families and students to choose pathways consistent with their aptitudes, rather than enrolling in a general secondary school solely for the sake of prestige. Today, enrolment in sixth-form colleges exceeds 55 per cent, whilst technical courses hover around 31 per cent.

The third factor is the impact on educational choices. Many families enrol their children in a liceo not because of a particular inclination, but because they associate it with a more selective and socially protected environment. This choice is driven more by the social context than by the student’s aptitudes, and fuels the so-called ‘licealisation’ of educational choices: enrolment in a liceo even in the face of strong indications that a technical pathway would be more suitable. The result is a mismatch that becomes apparent in the final years of secondary school, leading to failure to progress to the next year, late changes of course or dropping out. In classical secondary school programmes, around 80 per cent of pupils are admitted to the following year.