The School-Work Alternation, an opportunity not to be wasted

The recent decision by the Government to downsize the school-work alternation (SWA) scheme, set out in Law No. 107/2015 (so called “The Good School”), by cutting the number of hours spent by students in host organizations plus the reduction of funds by more than 50%, is questionable. The point made by this article is that this proposal is a bad news, a return to the pre Good School situation, when SWA existed only in the form of optional projects, in the autonomy of individual institutions. However, beyond some weaknesses and difficulties, inevitable at an early stage, the mandatory courses of SWA, introduced by “The Good School”, have produced encouraging results, helping students to more easily enter the labor market (AlmaDiploma, 2019). This papers aims at highlighting the potential benefits of the SWA which represents a real opportunity to modernize the Italian school system. Through this tool, indeed, it is the first time that in one way or another firms are directly involved in the training design, and pushed to create a true linkage between the work and education systems.