To establish steady and reliable communication with all children’s families and tutors -according to families’ needs and possibilities- was also a key challenge during the pandemic. We refer here to communication not as a legal obligation, but as a resilience mean and a personalized tool of engagement about children’s education.
Channels of communication between families and school have been updated since virtuality has exceeded reality. It is clear that this has affected trust relations. Health regulations allowed for early on face-to-face care of the vulnerable families, but apart from that, all the symbolic spaces were interaction between families and school happened were regulated and closed. There has been creative centres that have taken classes outdoors to maintain contact with parents and children, but they were a minority.
Experiences collected by interviews to principals of some segregated centres are an example of that. Virtual group chats with families and the tutors, as well as direct phone calls were created during the lockdown and were maintained after this. The closeness of the school with families in centres with vulnerable students have been a key factor in those vulnerable hoods. In some cases, as one of the principals interviewed explains, this has led to a closeness with families that now rely on the school more than they did before, relying on them to share their fears about the pandemic or other situations like the Ukrainian war.
According to some interviews, the main issue that several schools had to face during the closure and during the re-opening was not losing the contacts with families and students from more disadvantage backgrounds. While keeping in touch with some families has been easy, once the modalities have been set up, some other families were less easy to be reached. Some foreign students, for instance, have moved to their country of origin as the schools have been closed. Schools usually deal with these situations with their own resources, meaning that they did not receive extra personnel, such as linguistic mediator or social assistants. The same has happened with the more disadvantage students from Italian families. Even if they were physically in Milan, they were unreachable, not only for the digital divide but also for the little involvement of parents or other significant adults in maintaining the relationship with the school. Students followed by social services, non-accompanied minors, students coming from very problematic families were missing from school activities during the closure and some of them drop out when the schools reopened. Schools were basically left alone in managing these cases of extreme marginalization, because in Milan the territorial services have undergone a shrinking in the last decades, through cut of fundings and personnel. There was no possibility of adding extra resources, especially in terms of personnel working in the territorial services, to handle the most difficult situations. This was also due to the fact that the hiring of more personnel was mostly focused on the health territorial services to address the health emergency.
The pandemic has sometimes, in some virtuous cases, provided the chance of putting in action some existing networks. In the case of Milan, schools that were involved in networks with territorial organizations have managed to mobilize external resources to handle the crisis. In most cases, these networks were already existing but were not operative. The pandemic has represented the opportunity to see the functioning of the network and the activation of different resources to purse common goals: fighting the digital divide of some families, maintaining the connection between the school and the family during the closure, providing extra services once schools have re-opened or during the summer. For some schools, this intervention of local actors has renovated the motivation for being involved in territorial and community networks. Also some Parents Association have implemented some spontaneous actions to help schools to reach marginalized families, such as the provision of technological devices, support to develop homework or other kind of help.
Policy 5.1 La mia scuola è differente! (My school is different!) [Milano]
Goals of the program | One school has benefit from the support of the project “La mia scuola è differente” (My school is different), in which was already included, aimed at the reinforcement of the school-territory integration, with the goal of amplifying the educational experiences of students and improving the skills of all the actors involved. |
Target | School: IC Locatelli-Quasimodo (DS: Rudi Antonio Peri). |
Governance | The project is financed by the “Found for the contrast of Educational Poverty of Minors”, destined to the support of experimental intervention aimed at removing the obstacles being of economic, social or cultural natura, that prevent the full enjoyment of the educational process by minors. the fund is powered by foundations originated by banks and has a value of 600 millions euros. The strategic choice of the Fund is defined by a Committee, where the Bank Foundations, the Government and the Third Sector are evenly represented. The operationalization of the Fund has been assigned to the social enterprise Conibambini (Withchildren), that has published 15 calls for assigning the resources, selecting more than 400 projects. One of these projects is “La mia scuola è differente”, whose responsible is a Social Cooperative based in Milan (Diapason Cooperativa Sociale). The project embeds three cities, Milan, Padoa and Turin, and involves 5 Comprehensive Institute, foundations, cooperatives, universities and other organizations. |
Resources | See Governance |
Description | The project foresees five actions:
Within this project, during the pandemic the school has activated a counselling service with psychological support and linguistic mediation (also during the lockdown), widening of the educational offer during extra-school hours, sports, and two summer camps. |
Achievement / Criticalities | Haven’t been done yet |
Possible negative implications | Not expected |
Material | Web page of the project La mia scuola è differente!: https://percorsiconibambini.it/scuoladifferente/scheda-progetto/ Web page of the “Fondo per il contrasto della povertà educativa minorile”: https://www.conibambini.org/contrasto-della-poverta-educativa-minorile/ |
Policy 5.2 District mothers [Oslo]
Description | District mothers are volunteer women, primarily with an ethnic minority background, who work to reach out with information to parts of the minority population. In Oslo, there are 130 city mothers with backgrounds from 35 countries |
Goals of the program | The district mothers’ large network, language and cultural competence, combined with knowledge from the basic education, contributes reaching out with information to a group that the public sector often has difficulty reaching. |
Target | Immigrant population in immigrant dense city districts |
Governance | |
Resources | |
Achievement / Criticalities | Their assessment is that information and guidance for the immigrant population is best solved locally by the school and kindergarten owner level conducting outreach activities and one-on-one contact with families rather than translating information. The National Education Agency has given priority to a parent counselor which has been translated into 16 languages that kindergartens and schools will use in their information to parent groups |
Possible negative implications | |
Material |
Policy 5.3 Ricetta QuBì [Milano]
Goals of the program | A school has benefitted from the support of the Ricetta QuBì Program in which it was already involved. The program aims at counteracting the phenomenon of childhood poverty, promoting the cooperation between public institutions and third sector, and realizing targeting intervention to specific needs. |
Target | The target of Ricetta QuBì is represented by households and children in poverty conditions. The school – having a high percentage of foreign children with a lower socio-economic status, located in a context with a high presence of social housing and illegal occupation of dwellings – has been fitted from the program in a condition of vulnerability. |
Governance | Ricetta QuBì is a program promoted by Cariplo Foundation with the support of other Foundations, and it is active in Milan since 2017. Actions foresee the direct and indirect involvement of diverse operative partners, including the Municipality of Milan. The program shows 23 local networks that operates in 25 neighbourhoods of the city of Milan, for a total number of 500 organizations, associations, cooperatives and other actors. The school is part of one of these networks. |
Resources | Ricetta QuBì is founded by Cariplo Foundation |
Description | The local network in which the school is embedded has taken action since the first weeks of closure through diverse actions, especially targeting vulnerable families:
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Achievement / Criticalities | Actions put in place by the Ricetta QuBì program to counteract the negative effects of pandemic have contributed to consolidate and strengthen the local network. |
Possible negative implications | Not expected |
Material | Cariplo Foundation WePage dedicated to Ricetta QuBì: Website Ricetta QuBì: |
Policy 5.4 Cession of municipal spaces for schools that have ended up consolidating as school projects open to the environment [Barcelona]
Goals of the program | To be able to lower classroom ratio due to the education counsellor’s requirement To be able to use outdoor spaces To balance digital divide |
Target | Public and private publicly funded schools Vulnerable families |
Governance | Barcelona (council) |
Resources | Cession of public municipal spaces for educational activity Guarantee of reinforcement and hygiene personnel to guarantee bubble groups and school hygiene Tablet Bank for Vulnerable Students |
Description | The City Council of Barcelona have ceded a total of 233 municipal spaces (74 public facilities and 159 outdoors, such as gardens, squares and locations on the public road) to public and concerted educational centers asking for them (civic centers, houses, museums and libraries). These spaces have been chosen jointly and through the demands of schools and institutes in different districts. The management and activity done in each space is managed by the educational center itself. In order to manage this, the Bureau of the Coordination of Barris Areas is created for schools to always analyse, on a case-by-case basis, how to balance school usage and manage priority cessions and uses. |
Achievement / Criticalities | |
Possible negative implications | |
Material |