Social Reporting in Italian Public Schools in Theory and Practice

Abstract

Some of the challenges that schools are currently facing include the stakeholders engagement, the necessity to open schools to the local territory and the need to be accountable for activities and results.The Italian reform of the school system has required schools to overcome their self-referentiality and to make themselves more accountable to stakeholders. The social reporting process can be considered as an effective response to enable schools to become accountable, triggering fruitful stakeholder engagement processes and, at the same time, implementing a management tool. This is an exploratory research paper. It aims to describe, through a questionnaire, the awareness and dissemination degree of social reporting in Public schools located in Southern Italy given the particularities of this area. Frequency percentage and descriptive statistical methods are used to interpret findings. Results show that, although social reporting is well known in theory, it is still under-used by schools in practice.