‘Don’t Give Up, Some People Fight This Battle for Decades’: Illusion of Stability and Enforcement of Precarity in State School Teaching

This contribution draws on the personal narrative of Antonio, a secondary school teacher whose story recounts the illusory nature of stability and the human costs of administrative incoherence in the Italian public education system. His experience – marked by the sudden and contradictory revocation of a permanent contract, frustrating his ‘legitimate expectation’ of stable employment – prompts a wider exploration of the normalization of precarity. We enquire into how political discontinuity and multiple, complicated layers of regulatory frameworks (often rolled out and enforced with chaotic timescales) produce an enforcement of precarity. This enforcement places a profound emotional and administrative toll on those aiming for a permanent job, despite reforms aimed at making the process to stable employment fairer and clearer.