Individual performance-related pay scheme for the Italian teachers’ labour market: a possible application in secondary education system

Improving the efficiency and equity of schools depends to a large measure on ensuring that competent people want to work as teachers and that their teaching is of high quality. In all PISA surveys the Italians 15-years old student of secondary schools continue to record unsatisfactory results, certainly below the average of peers from OECD countries. Probably the rigid contract structure operating in our country, for which seniority rather than merit counts mostly in career development, provides inadequate incentives to motivate teachers and consequently increasing their professional standards. The view expressed here is that the performance of an educational system depends on the incentives related to the quality of the individual performances of the actors involved