Teach for Italy is a non-profit organisation whose aim is to address and reduce educational inequalities in Italy. The project is part of the wider international network Teach for All, founded in 1989 in the United States with Teach for America and now active in more than sixty countries.

The underlying idea is to recruit and train young talents, the so-called fellows, who commit to teaching for at least two years in schools operating in disadvantaged contexts, with the aim of raising the quality of public education and stimulating positive, lasting change in the educational ecosystem. The professional training programme, offered to those who pass the initial selection process, aims to equip them with the skills needed to become agents of change in the schools and communities where they work. With the long-term ambition of building a system in which access to quality education is no longer determined by one's socio-economic background.

This model has already proved highly effective around the world and arrived in Italy at the end of 2019. We contacted Andrea Pastorelli, general director of Teach for Italy, to hear about its genesis and evolution in our country.

Are there skills a person should already have in order to access your programmes?
From October to May we run a recruitment campaign and anyone can apply, including those who are already working in education. There are no age limits or any form of discrimination. Joining our network of fellows is an opportunity we offer to anyone who wants to seize it: the chance to undertake, free of charge, an excellent two-year training pathway that includes paid teaching experience. Once placed in schools or vocational training centres, our fellows receive a regular salary from the Italian state.

To become a fellow, candidates must pass a selection process during which we assess eleven transversal competencies — a blend of soft skills and the 21st-century skills framework developed by the European Union, the OECD and Unesco. In particular, we look for three ingredients. The first is a willingness to undertake a highly transformative personal journey: an awareness that the Italian education system is broken and inequitable, and a desire to throw oneself into an enormous social mission to address this priority. We also assess social awareness and the competencies related to wanting and knowing how to relate to young people: empathy, diplomacy, the ability to communicate and manage difficult situations. During the selection process we run simulations of real-life situations to understand how candidates would behave.

How do you identify schools in disadvantaged contexts to work with?
We have a partnership with the ministry at central, regional and provincial level across all the territories where we operate. Together with the Fondazione Agnelli, one of the most important foundations in educational research, we have developed a "marginalisation index" through which we analyse all publicly available data on schools in a given area. We identify schools with the highest dropout rates and the highest rates of students repeating a year and, in some cases, we look at how many students complete that school and then go on to enrol in university or the next level of schooling.

We then compare this data with information about the context in which the school is located: from property values to crime rates. Finally, we combine these indicators — twelve in total — to produce a macro-indicator that helps us determine whether investing in a specific school can make a difference.

How does Italy compare internationally, and within Europe specifically, in terms of its school system and educational inequality?
We start from precisely this question, and the answer is one of the reasons Teach for Italy was founded in 2019. When we compare figures such as the early school leaving rate or the percentage of NEETs — young people under thirty-five who are not in employment, education or training — we find that Italy's figures are very high. In some Italian regions, NEETs account for more than 33 per cent: almost triple the European average.

We are at the bottom of the table when it comes to educational inequality and, above all, we fare considerably worse than other high-income countries such as Canada, the United States, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Furthermore, over the past thirty years our investment in the education system has been considerably below average. And we are now beginning to see the consequences across all areas, from school buildings to a shortage of 220,000 teachers and head teachers.

Another telling figure is the one on student competencies, which are in continuous decline, particularly in mathematics and sciences, reading comprehension and digital skills. Though we are not alone: most high-income countries are recording a steady decline even while investing more than we do. Our first objective, therefore, is to counter this continuous fall in competencies. The second is a long-term one: we want all our fellows — who we hope will number in the thousands in the coming years — to remain within the school system and strengthen it from within. Not only as teachers, but as head teachers and beyond.

Some data show that the so-called social lift in Italy has been stuck for years. Only four Italians in ten expect their children to achieve a better social standing than their own. How does schooling fit into this picture?
School alone cannot be the only driver of social mobility, but it is certainly one of the key ingredients, and Italy is one of the most glaring examples of this internationally. Immediately after the Second World War, ours was a country with a majority illiterate population that, from the 1950s to the 1970s, within a single generation, became a country of readers and writers. This enabled the famous economic boom of the 1970s and 1980s and Italy's overtaking of Great Britain.

Public schooling played a central role, before stalling in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. In my view, this happened because we began to disinvest in education both politically and financially. The schools we attended were funded and well-structured. Nowadays, if you choose the path of teaching, you have to be prepared for five years of precarious employment (if you are lucky) and without any continuity in the classroom. Beyond school, there are certainly many other reasons. The fact is that Italy has always been a country with very little social mobility, as highlighted by a study published some years ago showing that the wealthiest families in Florence have remained the same for six hundred years.

You have been active in Italy since the end of 2019, which means you were born practically in the Covid era. What did it mean to launch this project during such a complex period?
We had been working towards the dream of Teach for Italy since 2017 — it took a couple of years to build it, and we set off at the end of 2019 with the first programmes launching in 2020. Clearly, it was one of the worst possible moments to launch a non-profit in the field of education, with schools closed and the country in lockdown. There were only a few of us, we had little money and zero experience. We immediately had to transform everything into a digital programme, and our first teachers began teaching via distance learning. It was an enormous challenge, a period during which I aged enormously! And yet it was also a tremendous opportunity.

Covid was a litmus test. Over the last ten to fifteen years, schools in Italy had never carried the kind of social or political weight they did during the Covid era. When you have a child, as a parent you do everything you can to give them the best possible education. And yet, when we go to vote, education is never on the list of priorities. During Covid, however, we realised just how central schools are to the functioning of society. In those months, we started out with fifteen teachers in ten schools, and our fellows performed brilliantly — having been trained in digital tools as well, so much so that many of them went on to train other teachers to make remote learning innovative and engaging. In short, they were immediately seen as exceptional resources. This social sense of redemption around schools helped us build a coalition of people — including outsiders — who understood the challenge we wanted to launch and who allowed us not to collapse but, on the contrary, to grow stronger and demonstrate the value of our mission.

How many fellows do you have, and in which regions do you operate?
First of all, I'd like to put out a call to action: our selection process is open until mid-May. In 2023, we received more than a thousand applications for 45 places. This year, we're aiming for 1,400 applications in order to select around 60 fellows and reach a total of one hundred teachers in 70 schools by September 2024. We have a three-year plan that sees us reaching one hundred schools in disadvantaged contexts per year, and we would like to select at least 120 profiles every year from 2025 onwards. We are mainly active in Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Tuscany and in Campania, Sicily and Sardinia, but in the coming years we would like to cover all regions.

At the moment, things are going very well: the applications are coming in and people know who we are, but we would like to be even better known. That's why we work a great deal with universities, but also with companies. Ours can be a great opportunity for all those people who at a certain point feel a little empty and want to do something different — something that has a real impact.

How do you measure the impact of your initiatives on schools, teachers and students?
We measure it on three levels. The first is the impact on our teachers — their growth over the two years, both personally and professionally. How they improve in terms of teaching practice, but also how they manage stress. The second level of impact we monitor is on students, again both in terms of learning and metacognition: how they feel after a year spent with one of our teachers, what their relationship with school is like, whether they are content and happy to attend, what they think of themselves and their role within the school, and what their dreams and aspirations for the future are.

Finally, we measure our impact at school level: we conduct surveys in every school where we are present and analyse the results with the headteacher, within the school and within the wider educational community. From this year, we are also involving parents to understand what they think of their child's educational journey. This is also a way of engaging them and fostering a sense of responsibility among families towards their children's educational path.

In other countries, the Teach for All method has been in place for nearly thirty years. Can you give us some examples that demonstrate how projects of this kind have a real impact on the school and education system?
The first three organisations, founded thirty years ago and then twenty years ago, are Teach for America, Teach First and Teach for India. All three have exceptional examples of impact to show. The first is east London. Teach First is today a very large organisation that places around two thousand teachers a year. In the late 1990s, it launched a programme focused specifically on east London, which at the time was one of the most failing school districts in the country. Over twenty years, those schools were completely transformed under the leadership of many former fellows — known as alumni — who went on to become headteachers or joined the ministry: the percentage of young people from that district now going to university has tripled.

Then there is Mumbai, in India, where alumni realised that the problem lay in the slums: children who came from there would quickly drop out of state school because they did not speak English, the language used for lessons. As a result, a network of schools was created across all the slums to give those children the same skills as everyone else.

Finally, there is the example of Washington DC. When Teach for America was founded, it was one of the lowest-performing districts in the entire United States. Over the past thirty years, the system has been completely restructured, including from the perspective of racial justice: until ten to fifteen years ago, all the teachers were white, while 80 per cent of students were Black. A great deal of work has also been done on the diversity of the teaching body and on the inclusion of diverse role models. This is something we at Teach for Italy also do and are actively working on: each year we have an ever-growing proportion of teachers whose backgrounds and experiences more closely reflect those of the students they will be teaching.

After secondary school, you left Italy to study and then began your professional career abroad. You then returned to Italy to dedicate yourself to a project whose very focus is education. What led you to make that choice?
I lived in China, in Africa, in the United States, in London, and everywhere I always built strong relationships with the Italian community. When you live with Italians outside Italy, you realise how much we miss our country. The problem is that many people don't find the right opportunities. At the same time, I couldn't understand why my friends who were actually living in Italy couldn't wait to leave — they were exasperated; every time I came back I found a country that was growing poorer economically, culturally and socially. That, perhaps, was the spark that brought me back: to contribute to what I believe is one of the top-five, perhaps top-three most important missions facing our country. After many years, after having helped other countries through the United Nations with great pride and satisfaction, I wanted to do something for Italy.

If we cannot make our education systems more equitable and restore their role as engines of social mobility, our societies stand little chance of surviving in a world that is becoming ever more complex, ever more competitive, ever less stable. In the next fifteen years, artificial intelligence will bombard us. If as a society we do not have the social, economic and cultural skills to face these challenges, our countries will continue to weaken and to grow poorer.