The importance of school orientation has long been recognized and widely supported, especially in its strategic function of preventing early school leaving and educational failure. Considering recent research and data collected by various statistical institutes in Italy, the dropout rate is still very high especially for secondary schools, even if in the last year has decreased. In May 2021, the Office of Information and Statistical Asset Management of the Ministry of Education, University and Research published the report The early school leaving in Italy aa.ss. 2017/2018 - 2018/2019 / aa.ss. 2018/2019 - 2019/2020 containing a detailed overview about school dropout in Italy. The document shows that the dropout rate has decreased from 17.8% in 2011 to 13.1% in 2020 (-4.7 percentage points) (Istat data, 2020). Owing to the pandemic scenario, a careful evaluation of these data does not exempt us, moreover, from the need to reflect deeply on the impact that the pandemic situation has had on early school leaving, mainly for students with special educational needs.

This research is based on data collected by 18 institutes of a region of northern Italy (Lombardy) on a sample of 1600 students leaving middle school. Each school’s headteachers delivered to research team data collected in two years. These data are related to numbers of students who follows or not the “orientation advice”, a document that teachers give – every year in January or February - to each student attending third year of middle school, stating their shared opinion about the best kind of secondary school he or she could attend successfully; other relevant variables such as grade point average, promotion in June, and lower frequency of school “debt” (a second opportunity that a student has in order to repair a school failure)  in the first two years of the high school. For many years the teachers’ team has been issuing each student and his or her family with a guidance council aimed at expressing an opinion on a possible course of study suitable for the learning process and skills acquired by each student. So, the research questions focuses the attention on the necessity to analyze which kind of strategies could be adopted by middle school to reduce dropout rates and to increase student engagement, what kind of collaboration is good to improve between middle school and high school and between school and family.  

The data delivered were subjected to parametric and non-parametric statistical analysis using the following tools: the frequency rate survey, related to the variables "follows advice" and "does not follow advice" and the type of schools chosen; student's t-test, which is a parametric statistical test that indicates whether an average value differs from an another reference value significantly (e.g. the difference between the averages recorded in males and females); Pearson's correlational indices, to assess whether a value of the first variable corresponds to a value of the second variable and whether there is regularity in the correspondence. This statistical test does not provide indications of cause-and-effect, but rather of the tendency of one variable to change as a function of another. Correlational analysis was applied specifically to the variables "final grade," "grade point average," and "school outcomes" in reference to the "follows the advice"/does not follow the advice" groups; the Chi-square, which calculates the different distribution of the data and whether this is due to chance or if it is statistically significant (e.g., the randomness of distribution of the first school year outcomes between Males and Females). The data were processed with the SPSS program.

The results of this study lead to examine some aspects that are noteworthy can be summarized as follows: all schools involved present structured orientation protocols, that have become an heritage of the whole network; the teachers who conducted these courses have a specific theoretical competence (training courses), together with a consolidated experience; only one school uses descriptors that could be useful in outlining standardized ways to understand what kind of guidance advice to give students, thus overcoming the traditional logic of equating grades to the types of schools recommended; it would be interesting to give a greater and more significant space to the enhancement of some personal dimensions (expectations, life’s perspective, desires, interests), with a view to promoting awareness, for each student, of his or her talents and weaknesses or limitations. This part would also allow students to project themselves into a perspective more linked to the "life project" and the shared construction of their future. Considering the network activated, it would be important that it could assume a function useful not only to facilitate information sharing, but also to promote strategic reflection on school orientation, in order to respect the personal dimensions of each one. In addition, it would be appropriate to develop paths to help students to understand, through specific actions carried out within the orientation protocols, what it might mean to carry out a particular kind of professions. Moreover, it could be an interesting opportunity to deepen skills mismatch and what are the real professional needs for future and the school ability in giving answers to these needs.

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