The concept of quality burst into the school world in the 1990s with the continuously interlinked ideas of innovation and educational and didactic improvement. From then on, schools have increasingly felt invested by an urgent and pervasive demand for quality: an articulated demand, coming in different tones from the various components of the school system. We could call it a cultural challenge involving not only those who are directly part of the school world but the entire community. This is especially so if we understand knowledge and learning as indispensable prerequisites for living in post-modern society. This process culminated in the 2030 Agenda (UN, 2015) and its Goal 4 which requires us to look at the future of schools from the perspective of ensuring quality, inclusive and equitable education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. This objective encourages us to look at the future of the school in a transformative and concrete perspective.

Therefore, in asking ourselves how we can achieve a school that is both of quality and constantly growing and improving, we consider it essential to take a step back and start from the data that shows what today's school is like. The picture is as clear as it is dramatic. Among the many, the most critical data: according to data provided by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (2021), in the world, there are still more than 63 million children under the age of 11 who do not attend school. According to the UNICEF report (2021), this number has risen to 168 million during the year in which the pandemic peaked.

Aware of this, we must turn our gaze to the construction of a vision of tomorrow's school that can consider the fundamental elements on which today's school rests, including its cracks, even the ones from the post-pandemic era that has overturned not only its ways of doing things but also its very objectives.

The main objective of this research is to identify perspectives and guidelines for action to reform Italian school policies.

The research has involved a three-stage design currently underway.

In the first phase, four participant case studies were carried out involving children, teachers, school leaders, and families from four primary schools around the world. The four schools are based in Italy, the Russian Federation, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. These countries were chosen considering the socio-economic level (according to data provided by the World Bank, 2021) and the percentage of investment of public expenditure - concerning GDP - in primary education.

On the basis of the dimensions that will emerge from the analysis of the data collected in the first phase, steps two and three of the research will be carried out.

Phase two of the research will consist of administering a questionnaire aiming at investigating the opinions on school quality of Italian primary school teachers and school managers.

Finally, during phase three, we will compare the results obtained in the previous step of the research with Sustainable Development Goal 4 of Agenda 2030. We consider it possible to expand the meanings emerging from the objective and sub-objectives of Goal 4, which have been summarized in an outline drawn up by the authors. The data is currently being analyzed with Atlas.ti and will lead to constructing reasoning on the possible theories that the school of tomorrow is called upon to follow to improve in quality, in line with Goal 4 of Agenda 2030.

A three-phase research design was implemented and is being completed. The first phase involved multiple case studies from an ethnographic perspective (Benvenuto, 2015). Therefore, four primary schools were selected around the world on the basis of their socio-economic level and the public spending investment in primary education. According to the World Bank (2021), countries worldwide can be divided into four socio-economic levels: high, upper-middle, lower-middle, and low-income. Therefore, we selected a reference country for each of these groups of countries, and consequently a primary school where to conduct the case study. The countries involved are, respectively in the order presented above: Italy, the Russian Federation, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. From an economic point of view, in the sample countries, the investment of public expenditure in primary education is very different and not proportional to the total. According to data provided by the World Bank in 2020, Italy invests 8.8% of total government expenditure in primary education, Russia 14.3%, Ghana 18.6%, and Sierra Leone 34.3%. The protagonists of the research are pupils, teachers, school leaders, and families in the last two years of primary school classes. The sample reached is of 6 school heads, 15 teachers, about 240 pupils, and 240 families. Regarding data collection methods, a variety of observation tools, including logbooks and checklists, and different research instruments were used. These can be summarized as follows: a semi-structured interview with school leaders; a focus group with teachers; a questionnaire to families; a focus group, and drawing and writing activities with pupils. Starting from the dimensions that will emerge from the analysis of the data collected in the first phase, steps two and three of the research will be carried out. They will consist of the construction of a large-scale questionnaire aiming at investigating the opinions on school quality of Italian primary school teachers and school managers. The sampling will be in this case a simple random sampling, proposing the questionnaire to all Italian public primary schools. Subsequently, a comparison will be made with Sustainable Development Goal 4, and its sub-goals, of Agenda 2030, of which we believe it is possible to broaden the meanings by considering the international perspective that emerged through the case studies and then brought down to the national level with the large-scale survey. Agenda 2030 is a document underlying all research that was chosen also since all four countries involved in the research are signatories.

A strength of the research is the depth with which the researcher was able to enter school contexts that are not always familiar trying to grasp nuances that are not immediately apparent. In this process, an attempt was made to give voice to those who are an integral part of the school and to bring to light the points of view of those who live the school every day. Fieldwork is one of the foundations of ethnographic research, a form of investigation in which the researcher is personally immersed in the ongoing activities of a group in order to achieve an understanding of the context (Wolcott, 1995). However, this is also a limiting aspect of ethnographic research: it is accused of subjectivity, as its results are seen as particular interpretations of a specific social action by the researchers involved (Pole & Morrison, 2003). As regards the individual case studies, they represent a small number and cases of unique and specific school contexts, not comparable to other schools in the world or in the same country. Therefore, only a careful analysis of the collected data, together with the intersection of different perspectives, will make it possible to approach the concepts of usefulness, generalizability, and authenticity (Pole & Morrison, 2003). In conclusion, it has been seen that the main objective of the research is to redesign the prospects of tomorrow's schools, towards a concept of quality. Inspired by the words of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), let us state from the outset that none of us can say whether the school will be better when it is changed, but certainly to become better it must change. Through this research, we therefore wish to contribute to the construction of guidelines that will enable us to continue the long and tortuous process of educational change.

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