Reforming Education in Italy. Introduction

This issue of the Italian Journal of Sociology of Education focuses on site-based management in Italy in the context of school autonomy, ten years after its introduction. It is a complex task to explain to an international audience what site-based management for schools means in Italy. Understanding this, may be a challenging task for the Italians themselves. To offer such an explanation is not the aim of the articles published in this issue, however. either it is to provide prescriptive recipes or to make evaluative statements about the reform’s failure or success. Were we interested in carrying on a similar ‘exercise’, we could look at the Italian system through a comparison with the English one, increasingly regarded as an “exemplary way” to be followed. In doing so, we could use two ‘classic’ analytical dimensions, that is the degree of structural centralisation/decentralisation (the role of the central government, the financial and human resources management and allocation, and so on) and the features of the evaluation and assessment system, although using them in a simplistic fashion.