Decentralizing the Italian Education System: Enacting a "New" Headship?

The seminar aims to present some tensions embedded in the Italian educational reform, arising both from the enactment of neo-liberal policies and the possibilities of democratic development opened up by the introduction of schools site-based management and decentralisation. Since 1997 the Italian education system has seen the emergence of new policies and significant changes in the design of actors’ roles, within the framework of a weakly implemented decentralisation. This scenario is investigated through an analysis of a war of discourses (welfarist: bureaucratic and professional; post-welfarist: managerialist and democratic-critical) that are shaping the “trans-formation” of governance modes and actors in the Italian Education System. The presentation is divided in two parts: firstly, the main features of the Italian education System are showed, in order to trace the historical paths that have conducted almost ten years ago to the so called autonomy reform, that is the italian way to the introduction of school site-based management. Secondly, it talks about a massive process of “actorhood” formation (Hasselbladh and Kallinikos, 2000) that occurred as a consequence of the new school autonomy framework. This process was aimed to support head teachers in developing the new competences necessary for their new role within school autonomy. In this scenario the “triad [selection, recruitment and training] of institutionalised processes” (Gronn, 2002, 1032) took on a different shape and new training policies were implemented. One of the most significant changes was the introduction of a new in-service training and induction policy regarding all head teachers. Furthermore it discusses how the Italian head teachers, increasingly seen as entrepreneurs and managers, shoul be evaluated, but hey are not, for their performance accordingly to legal requirements established in 2000, even if, to everybody’s surprise, are not yet been implemented. In the last ten years some pilot evaluations have been enacted, but neither an ultimate political decision nor a privileged set of a “core technology” made of methodologies and techniques have been established and institutionalized in this respect. The contradictions embedded in the policies for designing new head teachers and setting the “core technology” to train and assess them is commented upon, in the light of the war between the ‘old’ welfarist discourse and the ‘new’ managerialist one. A potential space for a democratic discourse is finally discussed