The term “educational poverty” has been dealt with in numerous investigations in the field of sociology and economics of education (Allmendinger, 1989, 2016; Checchi, 1998; Solga, 2002; Lohmann and Ferger, 2014; Save the Children, 2014; Pratesi et al., 2020). The multidimensional vision of poverty has led many authors to interpret basic competencies as an essential dimension of well-being, since they contribute to avoiding the risk of poverty and social exclusion, especially in terms of generating resources potentially capable of igniting personal empowerment (Benn, 1997; Abadzi, 2004; Stromquist, 2009; Nussbaum, 2010; Metcalf and Meadows, 2009).

There are different definitions of educational poverty. Barbieri and Cipollone (2007) describe it as a condition shaped by lack or inadequate level of basic competences, that is, reading, comprehension and writing difficulties; inability to understand and solve elementary mathematical operations and, finally, barriers to recognize the basic mechanisms of science. Checchi (1998) posits the concept of educational poverty in the perspective of the theory of capabilities. This has fuelled research on multidimensional poverty and the educational poverty has become a determining reference to consider education as an essential functioning, in the same way as health, social relations, employability and career prospects, housing conditions and economic resources (Sen, 1985, 1992, 1997). Since then, the concept of educational poverty have evolved in several directions, including comparative analysis between countries or between different areas of a nation.

Researchers from the NGO Save the Children (2014) provided a definition that describes educational poverty as the process of restricting children's right to education and depriving them of their opportunities to learn and develop the abilities they will need to be successful, in a rapidly changing society. According to this conception, educational poverty also influences emotional growth, educational engagement, and the relationships with others, putting at risk the children opportunities to discover themselves and the world. Along with this discourse, educational poverty tends to reverberate itself through a vicious circle, passing from generation to generation and depriving adolescents of the effectual prospect to know, to be, to live together and to act (Corak, 2006). This definition of educational poverty is applied mainly in the cognitive process during school years, but it is not so helpful when applied to basic competences during lifelong learning.

In this research paper, we consider educational poverty according to Allmendinger and Leibfried (2003) including two key factors: 1) the lack of a certificate or diploma, and 2) low levels of acquired and maintained basic competences. This definition of educational poverty stems out from a double-dimensional approach: if compulsory schooling requirements (in terms of certified years of schooling) represent an absolute minimum level of education, then basic competence learned at school may deteriorate over time. The total number of certified years of formal education cannot by itself be considered an indicator of skipping educational poverty, since it indicates that a certain level of education has been achieved, but does not guarantee that, years later than upon completion of studies, people will continue to be able to carry out operations and actions based on basic competences. At the same time, the possession of basic competences, if not accompanied by medium or high levels of certified education, can become a serious deficit on the labour market, where formal qualifications recall the function of accreditation of employees to employers as a primary source of selection (Spence, 1974; Kjeldsen and Bonvin, 2015).

We then present and discuss outcomes from a research comparing young Italian students at 15 years old and once they completed their studies, at 27-28 years old. The research aim is to understand if and at what extent educational poverty assessed at low secondary school resonates later at pre-adult age. By means of a pseudo-paneling technique, OECD-PISA waves 2000 and 2003 data on Italian students’ performances in basic competences have been linked to the OECD PIAAC 2013 data on Italians pre-adults’ performances in basic competences. In addition, we observed the effects of social origin on basic competences at "t0 - zero time" (first observation on PISA datasets) and at "t1 first time" (second observation on PIAAC dataset). Specifically, observed and compared basic competence are those captured by tests on literacy and numeracy in PISA and then in PIAAC (since the PISA operational definition of reading literacy coincides only partially with the PIAAC definition, operations of alignment have been inserted). In respect to data from International Large Scale Assessment surveys, our research tries to avoid the “rank and classify” attitude induced by the mainstream use of such sources (Gorur, 2014). We opted for an analytical and theory-based use of data and attempted to employ test-based scores for cognitive purposes, being aware of limits and tricks stemming from these kind of surveys (Desjardins and Warnke, 2012), using these data with a critical approach and bending them to our cognitive questions (Giancola, Viteritti, 2014). In this sense, we do not pretend to assess how poor Italians students are in basic competences neither we assume to measure the extension of educational poverty among the young Italian population. We rather follow a pseudo-longitudinal approach in a non-causal perspective mode in order to grasp continuities and discontinuities in the emergence/resurgence of educational poverty among Italian teenagers and pre-adults. The longitudinal analysis of the effects of ascriptive variables on test scores in the two observations, and on the co-variation chain between ascriptive variables allows thus to interpret the effects and their variation over time. Given the retrospective structure of the data collected with the PIAAC background questionnaire, the analysis also allows to observe the effects on educational careers (which are not necessarily related to basic competences) and on the risk of early school leaving and drop-out (Pensiero, Giancola and Barone, 2019).

In our analysis, we framed whether social inequalities at the origins follow a trend of the type "systematic bias" (moderate deviations between origin and t0 produce increasing effects over time, that is at t1) or an accentuated widening of the gap based on ascribed variables (social origin, gender, migratory background, geographical location). Ascribed variables have indeed a specific influence on basic competences at the two different observed stages. In addition, a substantial share of the Italian young population keeps on having poor basic competences from early stages (at school) to the pre-adult stages (when studies were completed), while another significant share even deteriorate those competences. This latter population has the greatest risks of being entrapped in a permanent status of educational poverty, with all the resulting multi-dimensional consequences. Finally, we found out that having a mother with a medium-high cultural capital may protect from the crystallization of educational poverty, regardless of the father’s occupation

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