Come valutare l’efficacia della formazione professionale per l’integrazione dei soggetti deboli. Lezioni dall’esperienza dell’area Istruzione e Formazione Professionale della Provincia di Torino [How to evaluate vocational training policies to integrate weak individuals in the labor market. Lessons from the experience of Provincia di Torino]

Sociological and economical literatures agree in asserting that individual integration in the labour market represents an important vehicle of social inclusion. In fact, individual exclusion from the labour market could have economical (poverty), sociological (disrepute and weakening of relational networks) and psychological (impoverishment of self-esteem) effects that eventually could bring to a spreading and persistent social exclusion. Vocational training policies, as they are conceived in Piedmont and more generally in Italy, are particularly helpful in contrasting such individual weakness and social exclusion. This is due to its pedagogical and didactical methods and to the attention that vocational training policies pay to the improvement of individual relational and professional skills. Both the programming and management phases of vocational training policies need, to be effective, to include an evaluation process that highlights its weak and strength points. Aware of this, the Province of Turin is enhancing its evaluation competences by directly implementing and/or by externalizing some vocational training policies evaluation projects. This article describes some of these projects with the aim of analyzing both the existing and the potential connections between the evaluation and the programming phases in vocational training policies.