Pnrr of the school on the high seas, resources at a minimum for the South. Svimez: “It will not bridge the gaps”

ROME. The share of funds destined for the South, which at least is equal to 40%, is abundantly respected, but the resources assigned to the individual territories unrelated to actual needs mean that in the field of nursery schools and school infrastructures the territorial gaps are not bridged . And “the purpose of cohesion of the school’s Pnnr – warns Svimez – is at risk”.

In fact, the ministerial criteria for allocating resources did not take into account the internal heterogeneity of the individual Regions, while the system of competitive tenders has often penalized territories with a lack of services and structures (full-time, gyms, canteens), also due to the weakness of administrations.

The danger, points out the Society for the development of the South in one of its studies, is that above all in the South, instead of decreasing, territorial inequalities increase; then in an area, that of services for early childhood and education, where the disparity between one city and another in the endowment of adequate infrastructures, in the quantity and quality of services offered to children and pupils, in the outcomes of learning and training, is already relevant and then has a significant impact on female participation in the labor market.

The most marked regional differences are observed for the availability of canteens, the absence of which limits the possibility of offering full-time work. Less than 25% of southern primary school pupils attend schools with canteens (against 60% in the Centre-North); in kindergartens it rises to 32% against 59% in the Centre-North. Sicily and Campania do not reach 15% against 66.8% in Emilia-Romagna and 69.6% in Liguria. The South also suffers from a serious delay in the provision of services for early childhood: the southern Regions furthest from the objective of 33% of authorized places to be reached by 2027 are Campania (6.5), Sicily (8.2 ), Calabria (9) and Molise (9.3).

The resources of the “Pnrr Scuola” (11.28 billion euros) on paper could in short represent a unique opportunity to fill these heavy territorial gaps, thanks to the 5.09 billion allocated to the plan for the safety and redevelopment of schools, to the 3.8 billion of the “Kindergarten Plan”, to the interventions for canteens and gyms (600 million) and to the 1.2 billion “New Schools Plan”.

The problem – notes Svimez – is that the territorial entities of the three most populous southern regions (Sicily, Campania and Puglia), despite the known shortcomings, have had access to per capita resources lower than the Italian average. The provincial distribution of funds to the Municipalities also indicates significant intra-regional differences, especially in the larger Regions: in almost all the southern ones, the province with the greatest investment needs does not coincide with the one that has received the most funds per capita. This situation characterizes Naples and Palermo in particular, which are among the bottom 15 provinces for per capita resources allocated despite having, for example in the case of canteens, a very low percentage of pupils who can use them (5.7 and 4.7 respectively).

To remedy this situation, Svimez proposes to reprogram the cohesion funds to continue the process of reducing these territorial gaps even after 2026 when the Pnrr will have reached the end of the line. —