Presentation  Presentation  

Summary

Link: Networks e Synergies

Social Development Networks

Chapter 1

Housing quality

Chapter 2

The centre and the suburbs: different systems of mobility

Chapter 3

The family and solidarity

Chapter 4

Quality of education network

Chapter 5

Living the employment network

Economic Networks

Chapter 6

Links within the economic system

Chapter 7

The trade network

Chapter 8

Veneto agriculture network

Chapter 9

Mountain synergies

Chapter 10

Production networks

Chapter 11

The distribution network

Chapter 12

Tourism: synergy between sectors and networks between individuals

Institutional services and
networks

Chapter 13

The network for workplace health prevention

Chapter 14

The Veneto model for the integration of social and healthcare services

Chapter 15

Public Administration: services for citizens and businesses

Chapter 16

Telematic networks in Veneto

Chapter 17

The environmental and territorial checking networks

Chapter 18

Cross-border institutional networks

Chapter 19

Inter-institutional local models




4.3- Educational careers after compulsory education

Indicators on student progress from entering education to gaining a qualification also give information on a student's educational career, in both its ups and downs. The educational career can therefore be seen as a network of individual pathways aimed at developing and acquiring personal knowledge and decision-making abilities.

Top  Student careers

When pupils leave lower secondary school, they have to make a choice about their educational career that will have an effect on their future choices. The road undertaken by pupils has as its basis the acquisition of a method of learning which, over time, can lead them to become autonomous in life and work.
This is why the particulars of each career play a central role within the detailed network of individual journeys which together make up the school system. Being able to evaluate the different types of schools based on the careers of the students who choose them becomes essential to understanding an important part of the complex mechanism that is school.
In Veneto for the 2008/09 school year, 70.2% of young people aged 18 to 19 on average qualified from an upper secondary school. This figure reaches 79% if we also include those young people who successfully complete regional professional training courses. More specifically, 29.5% of them graduate from a lyceum, 26.8% from a technical school and just 13.9% from a professional school (Table 4.3.1).
How do Veneto's children reach their high-school diploma?
By studying coefficients of transition, based on the relationship between students registered for year t+1 in year of course k+1 and students registered for year t in year of course k, we are able to estimate student flows from one year to the next. It is worth pointing out that these figures are, by nature, estimates, and therefore cannot be interpreted literally as the share of students who move on from one year to the next; a number of factors come into play such as students repeating years or changing schools. They do, however, give a good idea of numbers moving from one school year to the next.
If we use the average value of these coefficients, in order to ensure estimates are as balanced as possible, from 2004/05 to 2008/09, 76.3% of pupils in Veneto moved from the first through to the fifth year of upper secondary school: this means that almost one student out of four gets lost along the way. If we look more in detail at the different types of school, we can see some important differences between them: if on the one hand 82.2% of pupils in lyceums reach the fifth year, and 79.1% of pupils in technical schools, for pupils in professional schools this figure is lower than 64%. There is a clear difference between professional schools and the other types: in the former there seems to be a much more evident process of selection over the five years.
In both lyceums and technical schools the biggest stumbling block seems to be getting past the first year, whereas pupils in professional schools have trouble both at the beginning and halfway through, although it should be remembered that a small share of pupils in professional schools leave with a qualification after only three years.
Of the students who reach their final year, 95% of them receive their diploma (this is again the average figure in Veneto for 2004/05 through to 2008/09): this figure is higher than 100% for lyceums, this is because of the external examinees, particularly common in lyceums focussing on languages. For professional schools, this figure is around 93%.
Multiplying the coefficients of transition with each other and then with the share of pupils receiving their diploma out of pupils in their fifth year, we get the percentage of first year pupils that on average reach their diploma; consequently, for the reason already stated, this figure gives an estimate for the years under consideration.
In Veneto overall, 72.5% of first year pupils on average go on to get their diploma; this means that 27.5% of pupils start off in the first year but don't manage to make the diploma.
The differences seen between types of schools are representative of how the choice of school career is linked to it becoming a successful one: in lyceums, the percentage of first years who go on to get their diploma is 82.9%, this goes down to 76.3% for technical schools and right down to the rather low figure of 59.1% for professional schools, where four out of ten pupils don't successfully complete their course of studies. These figures provide important insights to be used towards educational planning (Figure 4.3.1).
Compared to the national average, Veneto schools have a high success rate: in Italy overall, fewer than 68% of pupils in their first year of upper secondary school go on to graduate from school, this is 4.6 percentage points lower than in Veneto; this difference is almost entirely down to the scant number of Italian pupils who graduate from professional schools (only 49.2%).
The differences between the different types of schools, which are often significant, can be cause for thought; the aim of guaranteeing each pupil who starts out at an upper secondary school a long-term, good quality and egalitarian education does not yet appear to have been reached.

Top  Problems encountered along the educational career path

The new frontiers, for a school system which aims to mould citizens who are able to create and pursue their own ideals for an autonomous life and who seek fulfilment in life through job satisfaction, are easily represented through the concept of successes in school and within education. School failures, on the other hand, often have a complex nature and spring from many overlapping and tangled individual stories of all types. Often a pupil's failure at school is accompanied by failures in other areas of life, in which the environment in which the pupil grows up and lives is also implicated.
Evaluating failures at school therefore entails not only concentrating on the pupil, but rather contextualising the individual situation within a larger framework. This puts equal emphasis on the family and on the school system itself as it is not always able to deal quickly enough with changes brought about by new social contexts (Table 4.3.2).
In the 2006/07 school year in Veneto, on average a good 38.2% of pupils evaluated at the end of the year were allowed to move on to the next year but with subjects to make up; this figure ranges from just over 33% in lyceums to almost 45% in professional schools, and it is within these latter that we tend to see the most pupils having problems with their educational career. As a matter of fact, for the 2008/09 school year, in this type of school more than one pupil out of ten had to repeat a year, while almost 18% of pupils tested at the end of the year failed. These figures make quite an impression if we compare them to the much lower figures for students in lyceums; the more the school tends towards a professional education, the more problems pupils have during their school career. It is worth thinking that pupils who decide to attend a professional school do so because they think they are better at technical subjects, but they are then judged more harshly on subjects based on theory. This causes a question to spring to mind: are professional schools more selective regarding their professional and technical/practical subjects, or is it the problems pupils in these schools encounter with theoretical/non-practical general subjects that create the differences we have seen in their success rates?
Overall in 2008/09, 7.4% of pupils in Veneto were repeating a year. This puts Veneto halfway down the regional rankings for the highest number of repeaters, but with a lower figure than the national average of 7.7%, and with the third lowest figure for the regions in the North of Italy (Figure 4.3.2).
Interruptions to school careers tend to mark one of the final stages leading to school dropouts, as the next step is often students abandoning school completely.
In the 2006/07 school year in Veneto, 2.2% of all upper secondary school pupils interrupted their studies: interruptions to studies in lyceums are fairly low at 1.6%, for technical schools this figures reaches 2.0% and hits 3.5%, quite a lot higher, for professional schools.
Students who leave their studies prematurely are more at risk, which is why the average share of school dropouts in the EU is supposed to be reduced to not more than 10% by 2010. In Italy in 2008, 19.7%. of pupils left school prematurely, i.e. the percentage of young people aged 18-24 years old with a qualification lower than a secondary school diploma and who aren't attending other school courses or training courses over two years long. This figure had not changed since the previous year and is more than three percentage points less than the figure for 2004.
In Veneto the situation is better with a share of 15.6%, unfortunately this is two and a half percentage points up on 2007's figure.

Top  Professional training within the network

Not all young people are keen to carry on studying and to sign up for upper middle school once they've finished compulsory schooling. In this case, there are alternatives within the school system to choose from, such as professional educational careers which will give the pupil a qualification to get them straight onto the job market.
Regional professional training courses, both those paid for with regional funds and with European Community funds, provide a completely different option to lyceums, attracting a marginal yet sizeable group of pupils who identify more closely with working towards employment opportunities than with embarking on educational careers based mainly on cultural subjects (Table 4.3.3).
More than six out of ten students signing up for regional professional training courses in Veneto in 2008 were male, a figure in line with the more general trend whereby there tend to be fewer female students in more professional-oriented schools; this is due to the fact that, compared to their male peers, females tend to be more motivated towards educational careers promising a more culture-based, long-term learning pathway. Furthermore, more disabled students sign up for professional training courses than for secondary schools: in the former this share equals 3.6% of registrations, in the latter the share is 1%.
On average, around 5% of students starting courses don't finish the year; this figure climbs from 3.6% not finishing the first year up to almost 7% in the third year.
More than 9% of those who do finish the year aren't admitted to the following year; in the first year 12.2% fail and this figure falls to 6.2% in the third year. Lastly, 85.9% of students attending a regional professional training course in 2008 in Veneto were admitted to the following year.

Top  Integrating into the network

In order to carry out their job fully, Italian schools have to keep up with the changes taking place today, guaranteeing equal opportunities for everyone.
This is why, in order to aid integration of those categories at risk of marginalisation, such as non-Italian students, it has to be the school system which guarantees everyone the opportunity to acquire the professional and cultural tools to ensure better prospects for the future (Figure 4.3.3).
The share of non-Italian students in upper secondary schools increased continually from the 2000/01 to the 2008/09 school year: in eight years this share rose from 0.9% to 7.0% in Veneto and from 0.7% to 4.8% in Italy.
In the 2008/09 school year, there were more than 13,000 non-Italian pupils in Veneto secondary schools. These students tend to go for technical or professional schools (more than 78% in the 2006/07 school year). Within the region, in line with figures on foreign citizens per province, Treviso stands out with foreign students making up 8.5% of its school pupils. Vicenza is next with 7.3% and Belluno comes in last with 3.9%.
These students come from many different countries, mainly North Africa or Slavonic countries.

Table 4.3.1
Indicators on student careers by type of upper secondary school. Veneto - Average 2004/05 - 2008/09 S.Y. and 2008/09 S.Y.
Figure 4.3.1
Percentage of first-year pupils reaching their diploma on average by main type of school. Veneto and Italy - Average 2004/05 - 2008/09 S.Y.
Table 4.3.2
Percentage of pupils having problems with their educational career by type of upper secondary school. Veneto - 2006/08 S.Y.
Figure 4.3.2
Ranking of students repeating a year out of total number of students in upper secondary schools by region - 2008/09 S.Y.
Table 4.3.3
Indicators on student careers in regional professional training courses by course year. Veneto - Year 2008
Figure 4.3.3
Percentage of non-Italian students out of total students per school year. Veneto and Italy - Average 2000/01 - 2008/09 S.Y.


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Data processed by the Statistics Office of Regione Veneto are collective property; reproduction of this material is authorised for non-commercial purposes only, provided the source "Regione Veneto - Regional Statistics System Management" is acknowledged.
English translation by the University of Padova Language Centre.