The widespread adoption of school autonomy with accountability reforms in education has generated debate regarding the relationship between autonomy, innovation and accountability. While at the policy design level, these three elements are highly related, several authors highlight the contradictions among them. By analyzing key documents and…

In 2015, a new performance-related pay scheme was introduced for schoolteachers in Italy as part of education accountability policies aimed at improving their performance. Beginning in that year, all Italian state school principals were offered the opportunity to distribute wage bonuses to deserving teachers. During the first year of…

This article explores how new public management policy ideas and technologies circulating in the globalised education space have been re-contextualised in the re-design of the Italian Higher Education System. In doing so, it uses the governmentality studies as a sensitising framework to problematise what we term here as the "calculative and…

Strategic government interventions in public education have shifted and blurred the boundaries between state, market and civil society modes of governance. Within this matrix of interdependent relations, schools operate under increasingly hybrid accountability arrangements in which public accountability can both complement and compete with market…

Performance-based funding (PBF) for public colleges and universities is increasingly prevalent worldwide, as a part of a broader pattern of marketisation in public education. This study focused on developing an empirical view of how, and in what contexts, policy makers use the concepts of neoliberal economics to design and support PerformanceBased…

This article aims to explore the evolution of school leadership in Italy toward a model of leadership for learning. Italy is undergoing radical changes in the governance structures (school autonomy and accountability) affecting schools in general, and school principals in particular, based on the way they promote, manage, and monitor the…

This article reflects on the fabrication of austerity in the Italian education system during the recent financial crisis and the resulting economic stagnation in the economic outlook. In particular, it describes the construction and emerging configuration of a mode of educational governance where standards, data analysis and performances play a…

This article deals with the changes introduced in the Italian education system after the 1997 School Autonomy reform. Looking at the complex interplay between global influences and processes of local inflection, the work explores the degree to which we are witnessing a significant shift towards a new mode of governance and the interplay between…

This article concentrates on the policy reforms of schools in England, Germany, France and Italy, from 1988 to 2009, with a focus on the introduction of market accountability. Pressing demands for organisational change in schools, shaped by the objectives of "efficiency" and competition, which were introduced in England in the 1980s,…

This article deals with the "troubled history" of head teachers' evaluation in Italy, as a specific strand of the controversial and fuzzy embedding of New Public Management (NPM) discourse in the Italian education system. Since the 1990s, NPM has shaped both policy agendas and professionals' subjectivities, leading the way to a process…

This article investigates the effect of school autonomy on multiple measures of student achievement, combining the individual data of the students participating in the International Civics and Citizenship Survey with their results in the national high stakes standardized tests at the end of eighth grade administered by the Italian National…

This policy profile on education in Italy is part of the "Education Policy Outlook" series, which presents comparative analysis of education policies and reforms across The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Building on the OECD's substantial comparative and sectorial policy knowledge base, the…

Italy is well known for its difficulty in introducing any educational evaluation system. This paper explores the dynamics which occurred in Italy in 2010-2011, within the context of the umpteenth national pilot of school and staff evaluation. Our research object is an unfinished project, observed in its development. We get close to the struggles…

Evaluation and accountability are two of the most popular catchwords employed by higher education reformers in the Western world over the last 25 years. For 25 years governments throughout Western countries have been using evaluation and institutional accountability as policy tools to steer their university systems at a distance. From a…

The conceptual categories that underlie the business analysis of intellectual capital are relevant to providing an explanation of school performance. By gathering data on student learning, this research provides empirical evidence for the use of school results as an accurate indicator of the effectiveness of the management of public education.…