The 21st School Ecosystem report by this environmental association, with data from 2020, showed that ‘in Italy schools continue to operate at two speeds’ and noted the gap between north central schools and those in the south and the islands, differences which it considered still wide regarding school services and construction.

It also highlighted there are still too many structural emergencies to address and inequalities to solve and showed that the pandemic worsened those differences, premature dropouts and other social problems.

The survey comprised 7,037 school buildings in 98 provincial capitals; more than 1.4 million students study in these schools, and the survey was conducted shortly after the Ministry of Education announced the allocation of funds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) for this sector.

In 2020, the country’s north central municipalities declared they needed urgent interventions in slightly more than 36 percent of schools, compared to the 56 percent of the schools in the south and the islands, which are in the seismic area 1 and 2 in the 74 percent of cases.

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