The next school year promises to be difficult for Italian principals, who will have to deal with as many as 15 vacant professorships in our country's schools. The figure is up by 34% compared to 2018-2019 and marks a new all-time high.
This critical situation is mainly determined by two factors: the wave of retirements generated by quota 100 and a new deluge of transfer requests.
Most of the 160 teachers hired in 2015-2016 with La Buona Scuola (stabilisations imposed by Brussels) were destined for schools in the North, which had many uncovered professorships. Three years have passed since then, which means that a good portion of the latest recruits now have the right to ask for a rapprochement towards home, the three-year transfer freeze envisaged for recruits in bracket C having expired.
Result: from next year there will be a shortage of teachers in Northern Italy and probably the solution will be a return to precarious employment, unless some classes are left uncovered.
The first reason behind the counter-exodus of professors is of an economic nature: with a net salary of 1.350 euros, one cannot survive with dignity if one is forced to spend half the salary to rent a studio flat in Milan. In the South, on the other hand, the same salary has a purchasing power about a third higher.
How to deal with this situation? In a recent editorial on his website, the labor lawyer Pietro Ichino proposes as the "first indispensable remedy" the correction "of the salary scales according to a regional or provincial cost-of-living index".
It is a solution opposed by the trade unions, who speak of "wage cages", but "it is not one cage precisely this false equality – concludes Ichino – which it does is absurd equal parts among unequal, why does it only take into account the nominal value of salaries and not their real purchasing power?”.
