School evaluation and consultancy in Italy. Sliding doors towards privatisation?

This article focuses on the increasing centrality assumed by non-educational consultants in the processes of policy design and knowledge production about education in Italy. We identify the recent establishment of the National School Evaluation System as a key policy trajectory and we focus on the case of the last policies to evaluate Italian schools (called Evaluation to Develop School Quality and School Evaluation and Development – VALES) as a point where a major shift occurs. We analyse these policies in a governmentality perspective as heterogeneous assemblages of knowledge(s), technologies and expert subjectivities. Our analysis shows how key changes in the dynamics of knowledge production in Italian education are producing a repositioning of the loci of policy imagination outside the boundaries of the State. Addressing the specific case of the VALES policy, we highlight how the displaced evaluative dispositif has widened the spaces for consultancy at the school level, fostering the interplay between private expertise and professionals in delivering policies and producing knowledge about education. We interpret the widening of the spaces for consultants and consultancy as part of a neo-liberal process of re-culturing of the Italian Education State (i.e. a process of endogenous privatisation) and the embedding of New Public Management knowledges and technologies within its texture.