Educational outcomes,policy reform and cultural capital in Italian secondary schools

Italy’s poor performance in various indicators of educational achievement, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has featured strongly in analyses of Italian education policy, and its progress towards the Lisbon objectives has been slow. With weak outcomes often linked to a highly stratified system of upper secondary schooling, combining high levels of track differentiation with a comparatively young track selection age, Italy’s education system has been characterised as antiquated and rigid. Yet the evidence that poor educational outcomes are differentially distributed between different Italian regions suggests that the ‘tracked system’ itself, which does not vary among regions, may not fully explain the Italian indicators. This article examines recent policy responses to these weak educational outcomes and, drawing on a range of data which take account of the links between social selection, regional inequality and levels of family cultural capital, investigates whether the concept of cultural capital might provide a more nuanced and theoretically powerful explanation of differences in educational outcomes in Italy.