School Quality and School Calendars

Luca : [00:00:00] Happy Saturday everyone, and welcome back to the Magic Towns Italy podcast! I am Luca

Anna : And I am Anna.

Luca : Hi, Anna. Welcome back. We missed you. Today we’re talking about schools. And, I would like to start with my own town.

Anna : Which is just outside Vicence, n'est-ce pas ?

Luca : Yeah, that’s right, in northeastern Italy. Now, there are four state schools in the town, and since we have just finished rating every school in Italy, I can tell you exactly where they sit against the rest of the country

Anna : Oh, okay. Go on!

Luca : So one primary school is in the top 10% in Italy for maths, top 10% for English too, which is very good.

Anna : Oui, c'est vrai

Luca : Another primary school just a few minutes down the road is in the bottom 10%.

Anna : Ah, in the same town

Luca : Same town, same town hall, same… top 10%, bottom 10%, and there is no way that any parent moving to the town from abroad would have any idea [00:01:00] how to find that data

Anna : Until now.

Luca : Until now. And this is the episode So in the first half of the episode, we talk about our findings looking at the Italian education system, I mean, throughout the country, so not just in my town. And then in the second half, we’re going to talk about the part that nobody warns you about, which is what happens after the school closes.

Anna : And it closes for a long time

Luca : Very, very long time. We will get there.

Anna : So what changes are you making to the Town Explorer on Magic Towns?

Luca : From next week, if you go to any town profile, you get a list of all the schools that serve the town listed from the nearest first. And for each one you can see how it does in Italian, in maths, and in English, and whether it is above or below the region surrounding it, and above or below the country. We have classified the whole of 50,000 schools all over Italy.

Anna : Wow. And talking about school ratings, like, start from zero because [00:02:00] most of our listeners have never heard the word.

Luca : Yeah, the word you’re thinking of is INVALSI. INVALSI is the national testing body, and every year Italian children, hundreds of thousands of them, sit the same tests in the same days in the school career. At primary, middle, high school, they do Italian, Maths, and they also do English

Anna : Personally, I hated them so much. I just wanted to…

Luca : Did you do the INVALSI?

Anna : Yeah, I did. No, I…

Luca : How did you feel about that?

Anna : They’re terrible. Terrible. I, I just wanted to disappear, to get sick or whatever

Luca : Really? Were they difficult?

Anna : Yeah, especially maths. Like, I don’t like maths in particular, but they were, they were pretty difficult

Luca : We’ve noticed Yeah. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Sorry, shouldn’t have said that

Anna : Oui, c'est vrai

Luca : The thing with these tests is that actually they’re not exams. They, [00:03:00] they don’t count towards anything. You can’t fail. If you’re really bad, I mean, if you’re really bad at maths, it’s not like Anna failed maths because she was bad at the INVALSI maths.

They’re completely anonymous tests, and even the kids themselves don’t get the results. Did you get the results back in the day?

Anna : Uh, I think that it happened once.

Luca : Okay. Okay. Well, nowadays kids or parents don’t get the results

Anna : Then why do we care? I don’t know.

Luca : Well, we care because it’s the only thing in Italy that helps us to measure every school across the country with the same measuring stick. Since there is no Ofsted like there is in the UK, and the Ministry of Education doesn’t actually publish a ranking of Italian schools, if you want to compare a school in Lecce in Puglia with a school in Bergamo all the way up in Lombardy, this is the only way to do that.

Anna : Yeah. Nobody had put it on a map.

Luca : Nobody had put it on a map next to house [00:04:00] prices and train times, etc, until we did

Anna : Okay. So now explain the ratings themselves, because when you first showed me, I expected a number out of 10

Luca : Our usual numbers out of 10. No, this time we don’t give you a number on purpose, so I’m gonna explain to you how we did it. The scores that we get from the ministry are useless to a normal human being, because the primary schools are scored as a percentage, and the secondary schools are scored on a point scale out of 200

Anna : So a 70% and a 70 score…

Luca : completely different things. They actually don’t help you at all

Anna : And so, what did you do instead?

Luca : So to explain to you, imagine that every school in Italy is lined up in one enormous queue in order, for instance, of how they did in maths. Then we chop that queue into 10 equal groups

Anna : Okay, 10 groups

Luca : And if your group, if your school is in the first group, then you’re in the top 10%. [00:05:00] Second group, top 20%, and we go all the way down to the bottom 10%, and that’s what we tell you. A school is in the top 10%, top 20%, etc

Anna : Okay. And the queue only middle schools

Luca : Yeah, exactly. We have a queue, so to say, rankings for primary, middle, and high school. So you’re not comparing a seven-year-old to a 14-year-old. They’re completely like for like tests and always on a national basis

Anna : So top 20% means top 20% of Italy, not top 20% of the village?

Luca : Correct. Top 20% of the country, which for a family from abroad is the only thing that means anything

Anna : I like this because I don’t have to trust your maths!

Luca : No, you don’t have to trust my maths. There’s no secret weighting. There is no secret score. It is a position in a queue based on official data. That’s all there is to it.

Anna : But I think that there are two more columns on each school rating

Luca : [00:06:00] That’s right. There’s two comparisons. One is against the region and one is, is against Italy, above, in line, or below

Anna : And why do you need both? Like, as a good school is a good school

Luca : Not really. For instance, take Marsala in Sicily. There’s a middle school there that reads above its region and below Italy on the same row

Anna : Oh, so it’s one of the better schools in Sicily? Really?

Luca : Yes, it’s one of the better schools in Sicily, but it’s still behind the national average. So those two things are true at the same time, and if you only showed one of them, you’d be lying by hiding the other

Anna : And for a family arriving from Denmark or Ohio?

Luca : If a family comes from abroad, they should just look at the Italy column because that’s the world that their child competes in. So if your child’s school is above the region and the top Italian level, that is a good school, and that is what you should be focusing on

Anna : Let’s go back to the beginning of the episode because I still find that hard to accept

Luca : The top 10% [00:07:00] and the bottom 10 in the small town

Anna : Yeah, in one smallish town

Luca : It’s actually not a quirk of my town. Once you see inside each town, these kind of stereotypes about north and south fall apart. Italy has great schools in places that are supposed to be terrible, and very weak schools in towns that are supposed to be good

Anna : Give me an example

Luca : Frankly, even happens inside the same school. We have schools that are top 20% for maths and bottom 40 for Italian, that, that sort of thing. Which is why we never really show you one score. One score would have hidden the fact that there is such a big difference between one, you know, subject and the other

Anna : Okay. But I have one question because, you are publishing the names, so school by school, including the ones at the bottom. Um…

Luca : yeah. Um, you’re asking are we making any enemies? Uh, so first of all, maybe. First of all, we owe it to our readers to be transparent. And if a family’s moving with a nine-year-old [00:08:00] across from the US or, you know, from China, and we hide from them which of two schools is better, we are making a mistake, and I don’t think we can defend that

Anna : No, no, I absolutely agree

Luca : The other thing is that this is official data. We just take the official outcomes, from national tests, and trust me, they are hard to find, they’re hard to interpret, and the Ministry really doesn’t make it easy for parents to find the right school. But we translate that into a system that any parent can understand, and then we publish it.

Anna : Okay, so let’s say that I’ve chosen my town, I’ve checked all the schools, I’ve looked at the English column, I’m finished

Luca : Yeah, you’re finished. You’re finished until the second week of June

Anna : Pourquoi ?

Luca : Well, you see, because all schools close in June, in the second week of June, and do not open again until the middle of September

Anna : Oh my God, that’s true. The famous Italian endless summer!

Luca : That’s right. Did you like [00:09:00] it as a student?

Anna : Of course, I was just living my best life having so much time to just play with my friends, play with my friends, go to the GREST, it was just a dream.

Luca : Did your parents like it?

Anna : I don’t remember. Probably not.

Luca : You never heard your parents complain: “Summer never ends. Oh my God, when will the kids go back to school?”

Anna : Yeah, a few times probably. What do you think about it?

Luca : I think the majority of Italian parents, do think that the school holidays are too long. And to be fair, they really are long, abnormally long. We looked at practically every country in Europe, the official calendars, and we added up the school year, looking at p- particularly at summer. We looked at Italy, Germany, et cetera, and the findings were a little bit scary

Anna : Pourquoi ?

Luca : Because Italian children on average get 95 [00:10:00] consecutive days of summer holiday. For English children, for instance, get 42

Anna : Oh, wow.

Luca : Are you, are you surprised?

Anna : yeah, I think that it really, like, reflects the Italian idea that most expats have. You know, the

Luca : Mindset

Anna : Find the time to enjoy life, all these things. I don’t know

Luca : Actually you know that that’s not where it comes from. The reason why holidays are shaped this way, it goes back from the, from Italy’s, agricultural past. It’s not like in the late 1800s people said, I mean, the people would get no holidays. It’s not like the Italian lawmakers said, “Oh, why don’t we give every child three months off to go to the beach?”

They, they got three months off to go into the fields and work, and, you know, that has just never changed. So everyone resists that change. But the interesting part is that Italy still teaches 200 days a year, which is the same as Denmark, and I [00:11:00] don’t think anyone will say that Denmark is a lazy education system

Anna : Definitely not

Luca : So the thing is that Italians are doing the same amount of school in a different shape. Italy is heavy on the summer and then takes practically no time off for the rest of the year, and other countries sprinkle, time off school during the year

Anna : Who takes the most days off in total?

Luca : It’s actually France with 129 days across the year, and that’s the most of any country we looked at. And yet the French summer is way shorter than the Italian one because they’re only off for, like, six or seven weeks.

For our listeners, there is a debate every couple of years or so, why don’t you shorten the summer, spread the days out, and, you know, make this three months, something more bearable for the families?

Anna : Yeah, but it never happens

Luca : No. Teachers are against it, and the tourism economy has arranged itself around the calendar, so it is what it is. It’s not gonna change in our lifetimes, I don’t think

Anna : Absolutely. I mean, plan for 95 [00:12:00] days and yeah… it’s the first thing I would tell any foreign family. In Italy, the summer is the families problem, not the schools

Luca : That’s right. I- Italians do summer in three ways. You mentioned one of them before. There’s the centri estivi, which are the summer camps, which are run either by the town itselves, itself or by, private companies, and they last a few weeks, usually just in the mornings. Then there’s the GREST, which is run by the parish. You went to the GREST, right?

Anna : Yeah, I tried all of them. But I didn’t know that it was run through the church

Luca : Yes, it’s church run. They’re gonna make you pray or sing or go to mass?

Anna : Maybe a few songs, you know. Ehm, Ti ringrazio, mio Signore. Non ho più pau–

Luca : of, you should do, you should do a playlist on Spotify, Anna. Um,

Anna : We already are on Spotify

Luca : Yeah, that’s true. And then the third option, of course, is grandparents. I mean, grandparents take the brunt of [00:13:00] the summer load, which is a big problem because, , it is changing fast.

Grandparents are retiring later and I would also say habits are changing a little bit. Furthermore, for anyone moving to Italy, unless you are moving with your own parents together with your kids, that’s probably not gonna be much help to you. So that is the real cost of an Italian summer. You have to plan ahead, ideally in April or May for the holidays, and make sure that you have, options during the summer to take care of your kids, through these other institutions.

Or do it the other way and take the long summer off, if you can, and travel with your kids, which maybe is the most fun way to enjoy your time in Italy

Anna : Sans aucun doute

Luca : So if this is interesting to you, you wanna know more, more about Italian schools and and you wanna see which towns have, uh, what kind of quality of schools, and also if they do have a school, very often they don’t, then head over to the Town Explorer next [00:14:00] week on Magic Towns Italy. The feature is available to our subscribers, and we hope this helps you even better to find your ideal town in Italy.

We’ll be back next week with another episode of our podcast, and then we are going to take, or actually I am going to take a week off, and finally go and enjoy my holidays a little bit.

Anna : Bon

Luca : Thank you everyone. See you next time!

Anna : Thank you guys. Bye