The Territorial Networks for Lifelong Learning .Between Strategy and Operation

The work illustrates how the construct of lifelong learning has conceptually and widely exceeded the limit of being considered a "service" and has come to be recognized as an enforceable right, configurable in terms of an extension of the right to study. It therefore aims to highlight how the purpose of guaranteeing the person the actual exercise of this right requires a relatively "new" type of organization in which subjects who, for various reasons, offer services in the field of training and work are involved. In our country, the task of carrying out synergistic operations, in order to ensure each person a training offer that meets his/her needs, the codification of training needs, guidance services and credit recognition is entrusted to the Territorial Networks of lifelong learning, in which the CPIAs (or the Provincial Center for Adult Education), play a leading role as public bodies of reference that encourage the enhancement of education levels and consolidate the key competences for lifelong learning. Besides the CPIAs the Territorial Networks for lifelong learning advance the involvement of numerous subjects: Universities, employers and trade union representatives, the components of the "non-formal", e.g. of the Third Sector, etc. The attempt to ensure the citizen a lifelong learning in a continuous and stable way, not only revolutionizes the cultural aspects related to the concept of education and its implications but means rethinking and redesigning the role of players and activities according to the supply of integrated services which must be directly matched by the offer of an integrated, non-hierarchical, open and flexible organizational system, strongly oriented towards collaboration in order to achieve common and shared goals. Methods. Secondary data are used for desk research and national and community regulations are examined. Results. It is shown how the organizational models of the Territorial Networks of the exclusively top-down or bottom-up type do not lead to substantial changes in the current system, leaving the possibility of guaranteeing everyone the possibility of permanent learning unfulfilled. In support, upstream planning and construction actions are proposed of each Network which takes into account, on the one hand, the concrete and "material" needs of the stakeholders but which, on the other, promotes a "value" change that also at the level institutional contemplates and supports the "culture" not only of the network but of "networking".