Again on differentiated autonomy, after yesterday’s brawl in Montecitorio

Given that the public education system is made up of 8,447 autonomous educational institutions, 7,154,000 students and over one million workers, it must also be considered that in the 2020-2021 school year, primary school pupils without canteen service in Italy amounted to at 57.94%, with a distribution of 46.53% in the Centre-North and 78.82% in the South.

Furthermore, only 18% of pupils in the South attend full time, compared to 48% in the Centre-North, and therefore primary school pupils in the South attend on average 4 hours of school less per week than those in the Centre-North. , so at the end of the primary cycle, a child from the North will have spent 1,226 hours more at school than one from the South, that is, approximately a year of additional education offered to one and denied to the other.

And again, dusting off the Svimez report, we discover that around 550 thousand pupils in primary schools in the South (66% of the total) do not attend schools with a gym, in the North they are 54%. This gap also remains for secondary schools, where 57% of southern pupils do not have access to a gym.

Hence the abnormal rate of abandonments in the South, 16.6%, compared to the North, 10.4%.

Faced with these data, we read in an interesting article on lentepubblica.it, what better perspective could the so-called differentiated autonomy give, considering that the Calderoli bill provides that the general rules on education (art. 117 of the Constitution, second paragraph , lit. n) can be completely regionalized?

And, according to the writer of the piece, the clause that allows the granting of autonomy to the requesting Regions only after the financing of the essential levels of services cannot be reassured, because many functions could be added to them which have no financial implications and therefore equally removed from the mandatory definition of the relevant essential levels, as in the field of education, and which could concern the recruitment and training of staff, the recognition of qualifications in competitions, supplementary bargaining and remuneration, collegial bodies , programs, study plans, timetables, class formation criteria, regulatory experiments, etc…

“If the requests of the richer Regions to be granted greater autonomy pursuant to art. 116 of the Constitution came to fruition,the territorial and social inequalities highlighted in previous decades would be further widened, also drawing in a fundamental area like this a definitive gap between the real situation of the country and the solidarity model dictated by our Constitution”.