Valditara: 'With 4+2 a school closer to businesses and territories'

From the new technical supply chain, the 4+2 model, to the Its Academy. From the Mattei plan to train young foreigners to the valorisation of each student and teacher. Dialogue between schools and businesses is 'a necessity for Italy today', said the Minister for Education and Merit, Giuseppe Valditara, with conviction. Especially because, added Fabrizio Palermo, CEO and general manager of Acea, one of Italy's largest companies, 'new technologies such as Ia and robotics are transforming industrial processes and products with unprecedented speed, and the right skills are therefore needed'.

In short, today, more than ever, it is necessary to invest in people, in their skills, starting with students: this is the message, shared, launched yesterday at the Festival of Economics in Trento, by Valditara and Palermo, during the panel 'School enterprises: talents to be trained'.

For the government, the goal is to 'offer opportunities to our young people, a quality job, well paid and consistent with their schooling,' explained the head of MIM, recalling the impressive operation to relaunch technical-professional training (by September, 10,000 students will be attending four-year courses and, thanks also to the NRP, enrolments in the Its Academy have almost doubled, reaching EU targets).

'At the same time,' Valditara continued, 'we must safeguard the competitiveness of our companies. A mismatch that has come to affect one out of every two recruitments (as many as six out of every 10 in Stem skills) is intolerable'. All the more so in light of the current denatality and the choice of the most qualified profiles to move abroad (in recent days ISTAT counted 97,000 trained young people who have left Italy in 10 years).

Today the challenges for the productive world are different and all demanding, as Fabrizio Palermo recalled: 'I am talking about my sector. The state of the infrastructure is worrying, almost 60% of the water network is over 30 years old, 30% over 50 years old. Half of the water that comes out of the springs does not reach homes because of leaks, which in Italy reach 42 per cent. Here, there is a strong need to adapt and modernise the infrastructure and there will therefore be a need for well-trained technicians. There are huge investments in the field: I remember, among many others, the more than two billion euro for the doubling of the Peschiera, to make it the first new-generation aqueduct in Europe'.