Education policies in Italy during the pandemic

The essay reconstructs the choices made in Italy during the pandemic with respect to the education system, starting from the preconditions in which the Italian education system was on the eve of the pandemic. The reaction to the pandemic crisis followed three lines: choices about school closures; support for online teaching; the drafting of the recovery plan, centered on infrastructural investment. The analysis shows the complexity of the decision-making process with the activation of different actors, with changing roles and influence due to the crisis. The highly articulated, and at times fragmented, decision-making process explains the difficulty of setting wide-ranging education policies, confirming a long-standing feature of education policies in Italy.