The National Evaluation System in Italy
Authors: Elias Giacomo 
Published: June 2020

The construction of a national service for the evaluation of the school system had a long and difficult birth in Italy, and lagging behind the international panorama. The first signals that show attention to this problem date back to 1990, at the National School Conference, where for the first time, a hypothesis about this was formulated. However, the times were not yet ripe for an institution of this kind: in fact, at that time there was lacking a centralized computer system capable of recording the data of the Italian school system.

In 1997 the Minister of Education Giovanni Berlinguer, by a directive, instituted the National Service for the Quality of Education, with the task of "assessing the situation and the effectiveness of the country's training system, its different articulations to at all levels, in order to suggest the necessary improvements and to be able to compare our situation with comparable situations in other countries ”. This service is established at the European Center for Education (CEDE), an institution which belongs to the Ministry of Education and which also has the institutional tasks of learning problems and their evaluation. By legislative decree N ° 258 of 1999, the CEDE was transformed into a National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INValSI) with a substantial extension of its tasks and purposes in the evaluation sector.

The realization of this National Evaluation Service (SNE) was accelerated by the establishment, on the part of the Ministry of Education in July 2001, of a Working Group whose objective is to develop a service which provide, at different levels of decision and intervention (Ministry of Education, local authorities, schools) useful information for understanding the phenomenon of "school" and its behavior over the years; this information is essential so that each subject, at their level, can make an informed decision on the policies and objectives to be set, verify their activation and progress, allocate resources correctly, with a view to continuous improvement.

The working group projected the SNE model and tested it in the field for three years, through three Pilot Projects (PP): PP1 (school year 2001-2002), PP2 (school year 2002-2003) and PP3 (school year 2003-2004), which are described in broad outline below. The objective of these Pilot Projects was to verify the technical and economic applicability of the initiative by making, if necessary, the adjustments suggested by experience.

It is on the basis of this experience that the legislative decree (No. 286, November 2004) on the “Institution of the National Service for the Evaluation of the Education and Training System” was promulgated, which emphasizes the purpose of this service: assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the system "by framing the assessment in an international context" (art.1); the seat is redesigned and becomes, to face its new role, the INVALSI (Istituto Nazionale per la Valutazione del Sistema dell'Istruzione e della Formazione). Schools and training establishments, Regions, Provinces and Municipalities are also involved, each according to their skills, to achieve this objective.