School in the South of Italy: (Well-Known) Problems, Recent Facts and Possible Improvement

The South of Italy experiences a serious gap in terms of human capital.The lessening of quantitative gaps is associated to persisting and significantqualitative gaps. Such gaps are just in part connected with a gap in investments.This indeed is noticeable for expenses in capital account - whose liabilityis taken on by local governments, which in the South have less funds andgenerally hardly care about school system needs - whereas the allocation ofstaff and their respective expenses, charged to central government, are almostequally distributed. Gaps are linked and are part of the overall bad workingof the Italian school system. For these reason it appears helpful the generalframework of the Action Plan for improving South's collective services, whichconnects the use of additional funds to an overall reviewing of the way theschool system works in Italy and in the South of Italy. A sharper action of systemreform, to be coherently defined at national level, would be desirable formay reasons.