Sti’m good 19.44 billion euros allocated by the Pnrr to strengthen our education services. Among these, no less than 7.3 billion are aimed at interventions for nursery schools, school construction, the fight against educational poverty. Impressive numbers, and an opportunity not to be missed. We’ll make it? The annual report of the Observatory on educational poverty #withchildren promoted by the social enterprise With the children and from Openpolis, draws for the first time a complete picture of the current situation.
A nursery. The Pnrr allocates 19.44 billion against educational poverty. Of these, 4.6 are for nursery schools.
“The Pnrr represents a great opportunity to reach disadvantaged children and young people,” says Marco Rossi-Doria, president of Con i Bambini. «Attention must be placed on the ability to spend these resources well, so that they are truly oriented towards change, and that this change is concrete and lasting, not ephemeral and partial. We need to learn from the many practices already in place to avoid random distribution and waste, bureaucratic excesses, the risk of excluding schools that would need them. Today in Italy, out of 9.8 million minors, 1.4 million live in absolute poverty – three times as much as in the last decade, and 2.2 in relative poverty. Educational poverty is the result of the economic, social, family and territorial context in which we grow up. It is a widespread phenomenon, which affects not only the rights of many children and young people but also the future of our country”.
What is the situation of nursery schools in this context? How emerges from the report, the Pnrr allocates 4.6 billion euros for the nursery and preschool plan, with the aim of creating 264,000 new places for the 0-6 range. Today in Italy there are 27.2 places for every 100 children, compared to the 33 foreseen as an EU target. In theory we are not very far away, but the problem is the territorial differences: cities like Ragusa, Caltanissetta, Cosenza and Caserta are under 10 percent. And often the territories most lacking are the same ones that struggle the most to present projects. And even if 40 percent of the funding goes to the South, precisely for nursery schools the tenders have been reopened several times because there were no projects. In particular Sicily, Molise and Basilicata have expressed a need below expectations.
Educational poverty: it is important to monitor projects
The the second point is the plan for the replacement and energy requalification of school buildings: 1.19 billion available, with the aim of building new schools that consume 50 percent less and have innovative learning environments. Here too, the differences between North and South are evident: in Bergamo, Padua, Lecco, Sondrio and Vicenza 80 percent of schools have energy saving tools, but the percentage drops to 20 in Crotone, Trapani and Reggio Calabria. There is a risk of not reaching the target in some regions.
In the end, third point, the interventions against early school leaving. This is 1.2 billion which will also serve to lower the percentage of abandonment from 12.7 percent to 10.2 by 2026. In the first tranche, more than half of the 500 million allocated goes to the South and Islands. But at the moment there would be various limits on the projects in progress, above all due to the scarce involvement of the educating communities.
How will it end? In this sentence, what matters is being able to monitor step by step the “grounding” of the Pnrr. «The tenders show that these are complex, evolving administrative and management processes», says Vincenzo Smaldore, editorial manager of Openpolis. “The availability of information to analyze the progress of interventions will be the only way to evaluate success.”
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