Young people are our first stakeholders

The school belongs above all to those who study, even before those who work in it. Telling the news about it means narrating a piece of life that affects 10 million people. This is the assumption that led Il Sole 24 Ore, ten years ago, after the experience of the fortnightly magazine Scuola, to imagine a new stable information outlook on the world of education, in gradually different forms (first the digital newspaper Scuola 24, then the web channel Scuola within the website www.ilsole24ore.com, then the thematic pages in the Monday paper edition), and it is the same that still moves us today.

Talking about education necessarily means being interested in young people.And young people. They are our first stakeholders. We repeat this to ourselves on a daily basis, when we select the news to be published and the topics to be explored.This is how one should read the special attention we pay to orientation, to the stages of transition between one segment and another, to technical education and to the link with the world of work.

Their and our future depends on it.

A country that does not have children and has already been seeing its student population shrink for years risks having little future.Especially if it continues to be, at the same time, at the top for Neet and school drop-outs, and at the bottom for youth employment and graduates. These are all issues that should fill the political agendas of majority and opposition alike, but instead remain systematically in the background. As confirmed by the debate that accompanied the approaching European elections.

The school we are trying to describe in Il Sole 24 ore, which won us the Pirelli Prize 2024, is a school that is necessarily open. To the host territory. To international best practices. To experiences that can make it grow. And the Pnrr, from this point of view, represents a fundamental junction. Both to overcome the territorial gaps that characterise it and to try to make it acquire a more European mindset on certain crucial topics (such as didactic innovation and assessment) that have too often been held back by the corporate need to protect those who work in schools rather than those who study there.