School guidance and school choice of students aged 11 to 14. Research design

The reference literature on school inequalities calls into play several factors, mostly extra-scholastic (economic, cultural, social), which influence the orientation counsellor and the choice of the high school, proposing a reading of the scholastic choice through mechanisms of social reproduction that are linked to ascribed characteristics of individuals. The present study instead focuses on the role of the school and of the orientation activities in the choices of direction towards high school, conceiving the orientation both in its function of self-empowerment and social promotion. School orientation has assumed an important role in the Italian school system with and after the D.P.R. n. 362 of May 14, 1966 which in art. 2, paragraph 2 makes counselling mandatory. From this point on, it has been followed by numerous national and European legislative and institutional initiatives aimed at affirming the importance of guidance as a strategy for preventing school drop-out, but there are still very few studies on the effectiveness of the orientation understood as a process capable of avoiding future school failures and personal hardships.The central hypothesis of the research grasps the school as a reproductive institution of social inequality through processes of self-exclusion and selection by teachers who lower the educational aspirations and constrain the choices of students to "less prestigious" paths based on class membership (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1970). By agreeing with the model of Boudon's rational choice, it emphasizes the link between socio-economic and cultural influences linked to the family to which students belong with the scholastic choices conditioned by class aspirations. However, the project also conceives the school as the place where pupils - expressing more personal skills and ambitions - can be architects of their own scholastic destiny. The school orientation then becomes a central practice depending on the choice of school that takes place at the turn of the the first and second grade of secondary school. The research design involves the collection of information through a mixed strategy able to integrate the information collected through quantitative and qualitative techniques. Specifically, it consists in a structured questionnaire to pupils and parents, semi-structured interviews with teachers and counsellors as well as the analysis of official school documents to identify consolidated guidance practices in Roman institutions selected through a typological-factorial sampling. The objectives of the research are, on the one hand, to highlight the influence of socio-cultural capital on the paths of orientation and scholastic choice; on the other, to evaluate the effect of school guidance practices on expectations and decisions to understand interacting mechanisms. and encourage young people of different social groups to enrol in institutions aligned with their needs and interests, taking into account the received counselling.