School-work alternation in the Marche region: inequalities in the distribution of training and employment opportunities.

In the first three years of its application, the school-work alternation shows therefore at the territorial level strong distortions and inconsistencies with respect to the objectives stated in its concrete implementation. The extension of the obligation with a top-down approach to a very large number of students coupled with technical and functional difficulties and a not untestable number of explicit and implicit resistances between the different actors of the educational system produced a series of very diversified results. Despite the difficulties, the request from teachers and students of an integration of the traditional didactic curriculum with experiences of reality in the work and social field remains very strong. However, in the analysis there are problems of distributive fairness of the training opportunities that each institute affords in a diversified way. Moreover, considering the high percentage of unemployment and sub-employment among young people in the areas where the research took place, there is a substantial methodological and practical difficulty in attributing a measurable impact to the work experience alternating school work on increasing the employability of the students involved. The results of interviews to teachers and focus groups to students show that there are two different perception of school-work experience: teachers tend to focus more on “soft skills” that students can anyways acquire even when the experience seems to them disappointing. Students focus more on the consistence of the skills they get with the their trainee path and/or the innovative profile of these skills.