Socio-territorial Analysis Of School Dropout And Educational Poverty (Erasmus Plus Project). Catania As Case Study

The essay put forwards an empirical study on the dropping out of school and educational poverty as part of an Erasmus Plus project. Both phenomena are closely linked. The incidence of social, cultural, and economic poverty all influences a child’s educational attainment, along with socio-territorial characteristics, families of origin and social networks. Understandings of the phenomenon of dropping out of school is one of the most urgent policy and practice issues, as increasingly numbers of young people fail to complete their secondary schooling, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, this is an important aspect to reduce the growing spatial forms of inequality in our cities. In Italy, Catania is an interesting case study as it stands out for its high degree of social and material vulnerability and for a significant rate of school dropout. We present the main results of research carried out between 2023 and still ongoing. The research is divided into two parts. The first concerns the socio-territorial analysis of the city of Catania to map the distribution of socio-economic fragility in the different neighborhoods. A secondary analysis is carried out on different databases of the National Institute of Statistics with Geographic Information System. The second part is the result of questionnaires administered to students at some high schools in Catania and their parents and it concerns the analysis of the main factors that influence school dropout: socio-demographic condition of the children’s families of origin; the context in which they live; the way they spend their daily lives.