UNESCO (2021) advocates for the need for a new educational contract that calls on civil society to become capital serving the school, as an indispensable tool to counter educational poverty and school dropout. Already in 1972, the UNESCO report Learning to be: the world of education today and tomorrow, identified in the concepts of lifelong education (éducation permanente) and educational city (cité éducative) (Aglieri and Locatelli, 2022; Cannella and Mangione, 2023) the basis of a new pedagogy of the contract whose intention was to collaborate all the parties involved in order to facilitate a responsible and autonomous appropriation of knowledge. This new social contract must strengthen education as a public commitment and common good, therefore make use of “pedagogical approaches that also cultivate the values and principles of interdependence and solidarity” and that connect “the assumptions of students” with wider systems, processes, and experiences, beyond their personal experiences" (UNESCO, 2021, pg. 54). In Italy, the social contract takes the form of “Community or territorial education Pacts” tools to realize the social contract and to establish proximity alliances between the school and its community. The alliances between school and territory are “privileged” mechanisms to address social and educational fragility and inequalities (Nast and Blokland, 2013; Valli et al., 2018) and can be attributed to different Constructs:

Construct 1. School as a stronghold of “social justice and cultural identity” also defined in terms of “reconciliation”. The school is understood as a “social glue”, as a space for the participation of the local community, as a consolidation of identity to promote actions that strengthen belonging to a community.

Construct 2. School as an expanded training system in which the territory is a “social artifact” in which to graft the space of educational experience (De Bartolomeis, 2018; Cerini, 2020).

Construct 3. School as an amplifier of “Societal Challenges” (Vranken, 2015), single actions oriented towards the generation of value that become participated territorial pacts and, generative of community (Equitable, Ethical, Sustainable)

Construct 4. School as a “regenerator of the territory” outpost for maintenance strategies in view of a community school. The evolutionary scenarios shift attention from the building heritage to the areas of relevance, to the spaces of proximity and context (Chipa et al, 2023)

Construct 5. School that feeds the “pedagogy of common action” (Puig, 2022) and overcoming its own isolation, multiplies educational experiences making them sustainable through attention to the partnership of a new “local educational ecosystem”.

INDIRE, through the realization of the National Observatory on Educational Pacts, has been analyzing this strategic tool for over a year and promotes moments of training and information to support schools and communities (Bartolini et al., 2022). In this contribution, through a pilot case in the territory of the city of Verona, the constituent elements of an educational pact will be presented, and some experiences will be re-read in the light of impact indicators built starting from the dimensions considered priority for a school that opens up and takes care of its community. The proposed case has the peculiarity of being born from the clear awareness on the part of the administration of the Municipality of Verona that the territorial problems concern the entire community and must be addressed in a synergistic way to try to find adequate and effective solutions. Thus, an alliance is structured at several levels: between the Municipality and other institutional actors (territorial pact);  between the school institutes of the city of Verona and the institutions of the neighborhoods to which each belongs. The community educational pact is part of a systemic action on a large scale that embraces an entire territory.

The need to investigate and describe the proximity alliances built through Educational Pacts led the INDIRE research group to identify a pilot context and define an interpretive qualitative research path aimed at understanding the forms that the pacts take in the territories. In a first phase, the researchers prepared a project format of the Pact to be compiled by the involved school realities: 12 Comprehensive Institutes, 80 teachers, and 12 school managers have benefited from a training course as a guide to the drafting of Pacts for proximity alliances. The collected data are subjected to content analysis, identifying a series of essential categories for the constitution of the pacts: educational visions of a community ecosystem (Teneggi, 2020); needs and objectives that the pact aims to satisfy; actors and roles within the pacts with attention to the interprofessionalism provided by the alliance (Cannella, Mangione 2023); types of educational spaces used (classrooms extended to the territory, unconventional indoor and outdoor spaces, etc.) and teaching situations provided therein. Subsequently, to the drafting and sharing of the Pacts, it is proposed to the schools and the staff in training the monthly compilation of a documentation notebook (logbook) to return, from an educational point of view, the experiences put into practice. The logbooks are analyzed through a coding process based on categories considered as priorities for the territory by the same actors signatories of the pact: students who participate in the expansion of training activities; families who participate in training activities; opening of schools in the afternoon; spaces used in the afternoon. The further development of categories and subcategories is developed deductively, selecting in the texts significant units of description (Mortari, 2010, p. 50): the resulting system of categories and subcategories is a codebook that guides the reading of the texts. Only by way of example, regarding the analysis of the Pacts, the subcategories of the ‘educational vision’ category will be developed directly based on the data, combining the development of categories deductively (without data) and inductively (with empirical data). For content analysis, the QCAmap software will be used, an open-access web application for systematic text analysis in scientific projects based on qualitative content analysis techniques (Mayring, 2022). These instruments allow collecting information about educational design through the Pact and understanding the impact with respect to some priority dimensions for the community, guiding its future developments.

The Educational Pact can be the tool used by educating communities to create equitable and inclusive education systems that are participatory and the result of social responsibility. The research conducted both nationally and in the context of intervention in the Veneto region aims to validate the Educational Pacts as a reification of a social educational contract (UNESCO, 2023) that allows for a new vision of a school capable of reading the needs of the educating community. In particular, the research will allow understanding the level of complexity of the Pacts constituted in the proximity alliances of the schools of the Municipality of Verona and how the realized Educational Pacts will be able to respond to the identified priorities: increase in the number of students who participate in the expansion of training activities; increase in the number of families participating in training activities; increase in the number of school opening hours in the afternoon; 4) increase in the number of spaces used. The reading made through the result indicators will allow monitoring the implementation of the Proximity Pacts and understanding through longitudinal research the impacts in the medium and long term. The study will also allow us to return different forms of “network management” between the school and the actors of the proximal alliance. The interpretive research on the pilot case will not only allow validating an “experimental model” of a community educational pact to be promoted on a large scale through coordinated training and information actions within the National Observatory on Educational Pacts but also dialogue with UNESCO proposing the ways in which Italy is able to realize forms of social educational contract for community schools.

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