UNESCO (2021) advocates for the need for a new social contract for education that engages civil society in supporting schools, ensuring equitable and high-quality education, and combating educational poverty and school dropout. The new social contract reaffirms education as a public commitment and a common good, requiring multi-stakeholder engagement to foster inclusive and context-sensitive educational ecosystems.

This framework is particularly relevant in Italy, where structural and demographic challenges deeply affect educational provision (Bartolini et al, 2023). Approximately 70% of Italian municipalities have fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, and 48.5% of them are in the Country’s inner areas. This has significant repercussions on the size of schools, which are often undersized and at risk of mergers or closures, as well as on the overall quality of education. These fragilities exacerbate territorial inequalities in access to education, impacting students’ learning trajectories and community development (Mangione e Cannella, 2021).

In response to these challenges, Italy has translated the principles of UNESCO’s social contract for education into policy actions through the Community Educational Pacts (Bartolini et al., in press; Locatelli, 2024; Bartolini et al., 2022;). Introduced by the Ministry of Education during the 2020-21 school year, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, these agreements were designed to broaden school services and ensure continuity of education under exceptional circumstances. The Community Educational Pacts enable forms of Solidarity alliances (Pratt & Danyluk, 2019; Evers & Ewert, 2015; Locatelli, 2024) based on relational pedagogy to address these goals: 1) Foster collaboration between schools and local agencies; 2) School curricula are structured around interdisciplinary pedagogical approaches that promote intercultural and intergenerational dialogue;  3) Students learn in authentic contexts, engaging in problem posing; 4) The goal is to learn in the world and with the world, contributing to its improvement.  Alliances between schools and local communities are "privileged" mechanisms for addressing social and educational vulnerabilities and inequalities (Valli et al., 2018).

In parallel, Italy has introduced legal frameworks that enable civil society to actively participate in educational governance. The Regulation for the Shared Administration of Common Goods provides a concrete mechanism for citizens, local organizations, and public administrations to co-manage educational spaces and services, reinforcing the school as a common good.

As of today, more than 1,000 local governments (municipalities and regions) in Italy—out of approximately 8,000—have adopted this regulation. However, despite the availability of this instrument, municipalities in inner areas still show limited engagement in structured collaborations, highlighting the need for stronger institutional support and capacity-building strategies to promote participatory governance.

Recognizing the transformative potential of these agreements, Italy has further consolidated its commitment to the social contract for education through the establishment of the National Observatory on Educational Pacts, coordinated by INDIRE – LABSUS. The Observatory serves as a national knowledge hub, offering:

• Empirical monitoring and data collection, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of pact implementation.
• Guiding frameworks and best practices, assisting schools and local communities in developing sustainable and effective educational agreements.
• Policy recommendations, strengthening the institutional integration of Community Educational Pacts into national and regional educational strategies.

By fostering evidence-based decision-making and capacity-building for school-community collaborations, the Observatory plays a key role in ensuring that Community Educational Pacts evolve from emergency-driven responses to structural innovations in school governance.

This study examines how Community Educational Pacts operate in fragile territories affected by geographical isolation, peripherality, and demographic decline. Drawing on theories of multi-agency collaboration (Epstein & Sanders, 2019), the research investigates: What visions of schooling emerge through Community Educational Pacts? What educational needs are identified in inner areas? What pedagogical practices are implemented through these alliances?

Thanks to the data collected through the National Observatory on Educational Pacts it has been possible to collect more than 160 Community Educational Pacts from all over Italy. The research focused on the schools located in inner areas to investigate what visions of schools are emerging in those areas in response to the main needs and through what educational actions schools implement them. A mixed-methods approach has been adopted. Quantitative analysis focused on descriptors from Community Educational Pacts datasets collected by the National Observatory, examining territorial and social context in which schools operate, partnership structures, and use of community resources. To complement the macro-level insights, a qualitative content analysis is conducted on the textual content of the Community Educational Pacts. This structured macro-level mapping provides an empirical foundation for identifying trends and divergences in the implementation of Community Educational Pacts across different territorial settings. The coding framework is developed through a deductive-inductive approach: 1. Deductive phase: Initial categories are derived from existing literature on multi-agency collaboration and community schooling, and social contract in education with attention to visions of schooling, educational challenges, the roles of community, typologies of learning environment. 2. Inductive phase: Empirical data from the pacts have been analyzed to refine and expand the coding scheme, incorporating emergent themes. The resulting system of categories and subcategories processed through QCAmap, an open-access software for qualitative content analysis, serves as a codebook guiding text interpretation. To strengthen the explanatory power of the findings, a statistical analysis is conducted through structured questionnaires. In this phase, a set of independent variables (e.g., region of origin, municipal classification within the SNAI framework, socio-economic indices) are correlated with dependent variables (e.g., vision of schooling, educational objectives, and pedagogical activities). The goal of the statistical analysis is to explain the variance in dependent variables, identifying causal relationships that influence the differentiation of school visions and practices across territorial settings. While the qualitative analysis of the pacts is case-based, the quantitative analysis is variable-based, allowing for a mixed-data representation that combines tabular summaries with narrative interpretation. By integrating macro-structural analysis, qualitative content exploration, and statistical correlation, this research examines: • Institutional frameworks governing Community Educational Pacts. • Local adaptations shaping their implementation. • Socio-territorial factors influencing school-community relations. This triangulated approach positions Community Educational Pacts as a key tool for redefining school governance, innovating pedagogy, and promoting territorial equity.

The analysis of the Community Educational Pacts in internal areas reveals that the involvement of the community in the education begins with the identification of common educational needs. These objectives also serve as the starting point for developing the vision of the school and the related educational actions. Regarding the visions, it emerged that the most prevalent ones in the inner areas, in order of frequency, are: 1) inclusive school (32.4%); 2) widespread school (27%); 3) school as a civic center (24.3%); 4) eco-school (10%). In inner areas, actions to engage the local community in school life rank first, alongside supporting active citizenship and environmental sustainability education. Preliminary results suggest that Community Educational Pacts are particularly crucial in marginal areas, addressing systemic barriers to educational equity and social cohesion. However, several critical issues seem to emerge. Chief among them is the failure of Municipalities in internal areas to adopt regulations and laws for the shared management of common goods that allow for the implementation of participatory governance processes. Despite the availability of legal instruments, local administrations still show limited awareness of structured collaboration with citizens and community stakeholders. Additional critical issues emerged from the qualitative analysis, particularly, the difficulty for schools and local community stakeholders in structuring effective co-design processes that equally involve all actors from the initial planning phase and the challenge of securing resources and funding to sustain the projects over the long term. In this context, the National Observatory on Educational Agreements plays a significant role, as it identifies guiding principles and provides training opportunities for schools and communities in developing Educational Agreements aligned with the visions and educational needs of the territory, ensuring that Educational Agreements evolve from isolated practices to scalable models of participatory governance in education .

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