School evaluation and consultancy in Italy. Sliding doors towards privatisation?

Abstract

This article focuses on the increasing centrality assumed by non-educational consultants in the processes of policy design and knowledge production about education in Italy. We identify the recent establishment of the National School Evaluation System as a key policy trajectory and we focus on the case of the last policies to evaluate Italian schools (called Evaluation to Develop School Quality and School Evaluation and Development – VALES) as a point where a major shift occurs. We analyse these policies in a governmentality perspective as heterogeneous assemblages of knowledge(s), technologies and expert subjectivities. Our analysis shows how key changes in the dynamics of knowledge production in Italian education are producing a repositioning of the loci of policy imagination outside the boundaries of the State. Addressing the specific case of the VALES policy, we highlight how the displaced evaluative dispositif has widened the spaces for consultancy at the school level, fostering the interplay between private expertise and professionals in delivering policies and producing knowledge about education. We interpret the widening of the spaces for consultants and consultancy as part of a neo-liberal process of re-culturing of the Italian Education State (i.e. a process of endogenous privatisation) and the embedding of New Public Management knowledges and technologies within its texture.

Keywords:

• education
• consultants
• dispositive
• subjectivation
• New Public Management
• privatisation

Acknowledgements

This article is the outcome of the collaboration of the authors. However, in order to ascribe responsibility, we declare that Roberto Serpieri wrote the Introduction and the ‘Education reform in Italy and the establishment of the School National Evaluation System'; Emiliano Grimaldi is the author of the ‘The shifting scenario of knowledge production in Italian education. Repositioning the loci of education policy imagination' and the Conclusion; and Sandra Vatrella authored the ‘Theoretical framing and methodology and the Army of consultants'. We are grateful to the editors and the two anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions in the revision of the early drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Roberto Serpieri is Professor of Sociology of Education in the Department of Social Sciences, University Federico II, Naples, Italy. His current interests of study and research concern critical discourse analysis in education, patterns of leadership and institutions of governance in the educational and social policies; paradigms of structuration, neo-institutionalism and analytic dualism; and the analysis of the actor–structure relationship. He has authored books and journal articles. He is the co-editor of New public management and the reform of education. European lessons for policy and practice (with Helen Gunter, Emiliano Grimaldi and Dave Hall).

Emiliano Grimaldi is a Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, University Federico II, Naples, Italy. His works primarily concern the analysis of education policies, both in Italy and in a comparative perspective. Educational governance, educational leadership, social justice and multicultural education are his major focuses of interest.

Sandra Vatrella has a Ph.D. from the Department of Social Sciences, University of Naples ‘Federico II’. Her research interests focus on sociology of education, sociology of migration and ethnography. She has published articles and books on education in prison, multicultural education and research method in education.

Notes

1. We intend ‘heterarchies’ (Ball 2012) here as organised forms of policy production and enactment that result, at the meso-level, in modes of coordination among interconnected organisations involved in activities that imply the continuing overlapping between hierarchical and horizontal relations.