Recovery: Oricon, full-time school meal against educational and cultural poverty in Italy

In Italy, out of about 40 thousand school buildings, only 10 thousand have a canteen and 44% of primary school children do not use this service. Oricon – Collective Catering and Nutrition Observatory, analyzed the investments envisaged by the NRP on schools to try to estimate what impacts they would have on phenomena such as inequalities, school dropout, educational and food poverty and bridge the gap in services between North and South, in addition to direct and indirect impacts on employment. What emerges is that, according to the Observatory’s estimates, the measures for school implemented by the PNRR would allow 164,000 children to pass from normal to full time with the opportunity to benefit from the cafeteria service. This is 400 million for the construction and redevelopment of the spaces dedicated to the canteen of 1000 school buildings, investments that Oricon estimates will be distributed for 3 quarters in the Southern Regions and for the remainder in the North-West Regions. Not to mention the direct employment impacts (10,000 new employees in collective catering and 34,000 new educators) and indirect (about 14,000 parents who could return to active job hunting thanks to the extension of full time and canteen) estimated by Oricon. the planned investments will undoubtedly bring non-negligible benefits to the children and families involved, however they could be insufficient. In fact, from the Oricon calculations, it emerges that when fully operational the share of students with full-time hours would still remain well below 50% but above all below the full-time requests of families, which amounted to 46% at the level national, with peaks over 60%, such as in Lazio. All this with negative repercussions also on the opportunity of reintegration into the working world of parents. “The PNRR represents an important opportunity not only to relaunch the growth of the country, but also to reduce the inequalities affecting the new generations, which represent the future. Investing in education and human training, from early childhood – explains Carlo Scarsciotti, President of ORICON -. It is important, but it is time to do more to bridge the inequalities that currently exist between different geographical areas of the country. School and canteen represent a right and an opportunity to which all children must have access, without discrimination. “Even in terms of accessibility to educational services for children, the situation presents a picture of disparity: Italy, with 27 places for every 100 children, is below the target set at the European level of 33 places for every 100 children between zero and two years of age. Average that drops further in some areas of the country: in Campania just 10% of children have access to nurseries and other services, while in Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna it is well over 35%, reaching almost 40% in Umbria ( in Lombardy the range is between 21% of Sondrio to 36% of Milan). If we then focus on full time in primary school, we see that only just over a third of pupils (37%) in Italy access it. Also in this case, the differences between the Center-North and the South are significant: if a Milanese child can count in 90% of cases on 40 hours of school per week, in Sicily the same percentage of pupils must be satisfied with only 27 hours. On balance, over the entire cycle of primary school, these disparities translate into one less school year between students from the North and the South. According to the elaboration, the new assignments would massively benefit the southern regions and the island regions, which would receive 60% of the total places (138,000). An imbalance necessary to compensate for the initial territorial gap in the presence of services. of adequate services, with a higher incidence in boys than in girls. “Full-time schooling, especially if conceived as an integrated path with a correct enhancement of extracurricular activities, including those aimed at spreading a culture of healthy and balanced, could actually make an important contribution to contrasting inequality, cultural, food and educational poverty – declares the President of ORICON -. We believe that the canteen, understood as a moment of aggregation, socialization and integration, plays a fundamental role in this sense, and for this reason Oricon is a candidate to become part of the green communities of the MIUR Regeneration plan through a project on the fight against waste and food poverty with the aim of contributing to a change in the eating habits and behavior of the school community “.