The pandemic, socioeconomic disadvantage and learning outcomes in Italy

This chapter analyses the extent of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy on educational learning. It examines the effects of school closures, distance learning, and discontinuity in and disruption to in-person schooling, as well as the (few) remedies that have been identified, based on national policy interventions, to mitigate and/or recover accumulated learning loss. In the first school year affected by the pandemic, Italian schools were closed for a lengthy period, and the return to normality in the following years was very inconsistent, with marked differences between regions, subregional areas and grades. In line with several other studies on the topic, our analysis shows that the learning loss, although not entirely attributable to the pandemic’s disruption to normal schooling, was quite significant for Italian students, especially those in upper secondary schools, probably because these grades adopted a scheme of rotating student groups between in-person and distance learning during the 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 school years. In all grades, the learning loss was more intense and severe for mathematics than for reading proficiency. As in many other European countries, learning loss has exacerbated educational inequalities among students based on socioeconomic and cultural conditions. Additionally, in Italy, there are different tracks of upper secondary school, and these often differ in the socioeconomic and cultural composition of students. Learning losses were more severe for students at technical and vocational schools than for those studying at scientific and general schools designed to prepare students for tertiary education. In examining these findings, this chapter also addresses the fact that the results of national programmes aimed at recovering learning loss have not been evaluated. Moreover, there have been few such programmes and they have mainly entailed allocating economic resources that schools can use as they see fit to improve educational achievement