The growing plurality of religious belongings has become an ordinary condition of contemporary schooling (Knauth, 2008; Vestrucci, 2023). It challenges school systems not only at an organizational level, but also at a deeper one, calling into question education as a practice of coexistence, recognition, and the construction of a shared horizon (Bano et al., 2020; Goodman, 2012). Schools are required to engage with differences that permeate students’ lived experiences, relationships, implicit curricula, and forms of participation in school life (Ahmed & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2015; Haynes, 2023), making reflection on how such differences are acknowledged or silenced unavoidable.

Within this framework, the central issue is not the presence of religion in school spaces per se, but institutional responses to its plurality. Strategies based on the neutralization or symbolic removal of the religious dimension, historically associated with secular arrangements of schooling (Farrow, 2004), risk producing institutional indifference that does not eliminate asymmetries but makes them opaque (Benhabib, 2005; Lee, 2017). The absence of overt dialogue may therefore coincide with a failure to engage educationally with difference, leaving tensions unaddressed and shaping students’ experiences and teachers’ practices (Davis, 2010; Zilliacus, 2013).

Against this backdrop, the concept of reasonable accommodation offers a useful lens for analysing school practices (Bribosia et al., 2010; Griffiths, 2016). Beyond its legal origins and association with special educational needs (de Asís Roig, 2016), it can be understood as a way for schools to mediate between common rules and concrete situations, avoiding assimilation and fragmentation (Hill KC & Valero-Estarellas, 2024). In educational settings, it takes the form of everyday micro-decisions affecting students’ participation in school life (Beaman, 2012). When such decisions rely primarily on individual initiative, they risk uneven responses and shift the management of pluralism from institutional responsibility to personal sensitivity.

School autonomy represents a crucial node within this tension. When reduced to a bureaucratic margin, it remains a largely unquestioned backdrop. When embraced as a space for educational decision-making, it brings to the surface value-laden choices orienting school action (Urgate et al., 2022). Autonomous decisions related to religious pluralism may expose schools to symbolic conflicts and public contestation, particularly when they challenge implicit notions of cultural normality (MacMullen, 2009). In such moments, schools become sites of confrontation between competing conceptions of educational justice, secularism, and civic coexistence.

Religious pluralism thus emerges not as an issue for emergency-driven responses, but as a structural challenge exposing the limits of secular frameworks centred on neutrality. Practices of reasonable accommodation and the exercise of school autonomy point to the need for a post-secular understanding of schooling (Fabretti, 2013), in which educational responsibility toward religious difference is institutionally assumed rather than neutralized.

Building on these premises, the paper focuses on Italian school system. Over recent decades, Italian schools have experienced growing cultural and religious heterogeneity, while school autonomy, introduced in the early 2000s, has expanded local responsibility for educational decision-making. More recently, the introduction of reasonable accommodation into the Italian legal framework (Law 62/2024) has reshaped how religious difference is recognized and negotiated in public schools.

Located in Lombardy, this study aims to answer the following questions:

• How everyday school practices contribute to making religious pluralism an object of educational recognition, or conversely, of institutional invisibilisation;
• How school autonomy is interpreted and enacted by educational actors in managing religious pluralism, particularly in relation to practices of reasonable accommodation and the tensions they generate.

This empirical focus is not intended as a merely local case, but as a vantage point for engaging with broader European and international debates on how public schools negotiate religious pluralism within non-confessional education systems.

The study adopts a qualitative approach (Atkins & Wallace, 2012) in order to understand how religious pluralism is interpreted, managed, and given meaning in school settings. A qualitative design is suited to examining situated practices, representations, and decision-making processes, with attention to the meanings attributed by educational actors and to the discursive frames through which these meanings are produced. The aim is not statistical generalization, but an in-depth analysis of complex educational dynamics that are often implicit and only loosely formalized. The research design is multi-method and organized around two complementary strands. The first consists of semi-structured interviews with school actors (teachers and school leaders), aimed at reconstructing everyday practices, approaches to manage religious diversity, and perceptions of school autonomy. The second strand focuses on emblematic public cases, analysed through critical examination of journalistic texts and institutional communications, to explore how school practices related to religious pluralism are discursively constructed, legitimized, or contested in the public sphere. Combining these strands makes it possible to connect educational practice with its public representation. Interviews followed a flexible guide designed in order to elicit professional narratives and reflection on educational decisions in concrete situations (religious holidays, symbols, classroom activities, relations with families). The discursive corpus for the case studies was selected through purposive sampling, prioritizing sources that capture a range of interpretive frames in public debate. Interview participants included seven upper-secondary teachers and one school leader from schools in Lombardy. The sample was built through intentional heterogeneity, spanning different subjects, roles, and school types in order to capture diverse professional positions and educational experiences. Data analysis proceeded in two stages. Interviews were analysed through thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) via an iterative process of familiarization, coding, and theme development in dialogue with the theoretical framework. Case-study materials were examined using critical discourse analysis (Weiss & Wodak, 2007), focusing on lexical choices, interpretive frames, and processes of symbolic legitimation. Triangulating methods and sources strengthened interpretive consistency and helped identify tensions between school practices and public discourse.

The interviews depict a context in which religious pluralism is widespread in schools but rarely addressed in an explicit or systematic way. They describe everyday school life as largely free of open conflict, managed through informal practices of respect and relational approaches to difference. However, this apparent normality coexists with a lack of shared frameworks. Religious pluralism tends to remain a silent background rather than a pedagogical focus. When accommodation practices occur, they are episodic, reliant on individual sensitivity, and weakly supported institutionally, revealing a tension between attention to concrete situations and the fragility of school responses. By contrast, analysis of public cases shows that when these practices become visible in media and political arenas, they are often reframed in conflictual terms. Decisions grounded in educational or organizational considerations are discursively transformed into identity-based or ideological acts, activating polarized frames centred on threat or loss of neutrality. In this shift to the public sphere, school autonomy and reasonable accommodation lose their pragmatic character and acquire symbolic meanings that hinder nuanced debate on pluralism as a structural condition of contemporary education. Overall, the study contributes to international debates on education in plural societies by advancing a practice-oriented and discursive understanding of religious pluralism. It shows how pluralism is produced at the intersection of everyday educational action, institutional governance, and public discourse, dynamics that resonate across formally non-confessional education systems. Within an education from religions perspective (Fabretti, 2013), this analysis supports a shift from a secular framework centred on neutrality toward a post-secular understanding of schooling, in which religious diversity is recognized as a legitimate dimension of civic and educational experience. In this post-secular horizon, the school emerges as a fragile yet crucial site of civic learning, where religious diversity can foster reflexivity, democratic negotiation, and shared responsibility rather than ideological polarization.

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