Thanks to PNRR competitions and eligible candidates, 84 per cent of vacant teaching posts have been filled

Although progress is slow, the three-year recruitment plan for the education sector – offering a total of 70,000 posts, to be advertised from 2023 onwards thanks to funding from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) – is beginning to bear fruit. This is also thanks to the regional lists introduced this year, which contain the names of successful candidates from all previous selection rounds. This is confirmed by the figures on permanent appointments for 2026/27, which the Ministry of Education and Merit shared with the trade unions in recent days.

Of the 46,642 appointments authorised by the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), 34,786 were successfully filled, comprising both standard and support teaching posts; if we add to these, on the one hand, the 3,178 fixed-term contracts for teachers on the first-tier GPS support list – with permanent appointment already scheduled for 2027/28 – and the 1,495 contracts signed by teachers in lower and upper secondary schools who have passed the competitive examination but are still awaiting certification, the total number of posts filled rises to 39,459. This includes approximately 2,200 eligible candidates.

Over 84 per cent of vacant teaching posts have therefore been filled by a ‘permanent’ teacher. If that isn’t a record, it’s certainly close. At least for the last five years. In 2025/26, the figure stood at 29,685 successful appointments out of 48,504 authorised (a coverage rate of 61.2 per cent); in 2024/25, the figure stood at 45,124 out of 64,156 (70.3 per cent); in 2023/24, 40,619 out of 50,807 (79.9 per cent); and in 2022/23, 41,359 out of 94,130 (43.9 per cent). Even if we go back to pre-Covid times and beyond, the result remains the same.

As is often the case when we talk about education in our country, however, the picture is not entirely clear-cut. Firstly, because the regional data shows that the rate at which vacant teaching posts are filled reaches 100 per cent in some regions (the South, but also Tuscany) and in some cases even exceeds it (probably due to adjustments and recalculations, ed.), whilst in others it stands at 64.5 per cent (in Lombardy), 70.6 per cent (in Liguria) or 74.5 per cent (in Friuli-Venezia Giulia). This demonstrates that the difficulty faced by aspiring teachers from the South – where the waiting lists are traditionally full – in moving to the North to work remains unchanged. And this is despite the promises of subsidised rents under the ‘Piano Casa’ housing scheme, which, however, is unlikely to bear fruit for at least two years.

The second point to highlight concerns the still high number of staff on temporary contracts in our schools. If we add the 7,100 posts that remained unfilled following the latest round of permanent appointments to the 118,000 support teaching supply posts that had been allocated as at 31 August, according to the figures released by the Minister, Giuseppe Valditara, we arrive at a total of 125,000 fixed-term contracts. By the end of the year, this figure could easily reach 140,000–150,000. This is an almost inherent backlog, which is unlikely to be reduced until a decision is taken to convert some of the exceptional support teaching posts into permanent posts.