The war continues diploma factories, bye “offer” 3 or 4 years in one at private schools: There will be only external chairpersons for exams and students will have to attend all sessions. Therefore, it will no longer be possible to renew more than two years of school together with one aptitude test. The Ministry of Education and Merit is preparing anti-diploma regulations against those private schools that issue diplomas in exchange for very expensive enrolments. “To fight this phenomenon – Minister Giuseppe Valditara explained – the Ministry has launched an extraordinary surveillance plan, while on the legislative front, we are working on measures to prevent the reproduction of distortions in the system.”
The extraordinary plan envisages more intensive controls by ministerial inspectors, who are already working to establish, especially in some areas of Campania, Lazio, and Sicily, whether the legal requirements for the recognition and maintenance of the status of a private school are met by the administrative and bureaucratic point of view, which also concerns of all employees. To strengthen investigative activities, a Memorandum of Understanding with the Financial Police is expected to be concluded. Inspection panels also verify the presence of students in the classroom: in the so-called diploma mills, it happens that there are very few students in the classroom during the year, and they then multiply during exams with additional attendance at classes.
In these aspects, the government’s draft law will soon come, which will establish the obligation to adopt an electronic register and a protocol to confirm the attendance of students and prevent the subsequent flow of enrollments. There is also a maximum limit of fifth classes, which must be in the number corresponding to the classes in each year of the course, and a minimum number of students to form classes.
The aptitude tests it will be possible to study for a maximum of two years in the same school year, not three or four with one exam, as is often advertised online. For the aptitude test, the chairman of the committee must always be outside the school. “These are fundamental and urgent interventions – emphasized Valditara – that will allow us to strengthen the role of the many private schools that function properly within the national education system.” The percentage of diploma holders among private schools is very low and early verification would benefit the entire private sector. According to the documentation of “Tuttoscuola”, which for years has condemned the practice of the easy diploma, there are less than a hundred private schools in which there was an abnormal increase in enrollment between the fourth and fifth years: last year of 6.5% of 1423 private secondary schools.
“Tuttoscuola” also highlights the areas where this increase in final-year students is most noticeable: the institutes are concentrated in all the provinces of Campania, in the provinces of Rome and Frosinone in Lazio and Palermo and Agrigento in Sicily. But the students who go to get their diploma in these institutes still come from all over Italy, in a kind of “diploma tourism” that avoids the obligation to complete three-quarters of the course. Meanwhile, the turnaround is remarkable considering that the price for the qualifying exams is between 1,500 and 3,000 euros, while the price for the high school diploma is between 2,500 and 4,500 euros with highs of over 8,000 euros.
