Abstract

The quality of school infrastructure can exert a strong impact on the educational process, in terms of improvement of health, safety, environmental sustainability, relations between institutions and communities, social equity and educational achievement. Heightened awareness of the role of spatiality and physical environments in schooling requires information about educators’ perceptions. After having provided background information about school infrastructure in Italy, this article explores Italian teachers’ and principals’ opinions on the inadequacy of school buildings and compares them with those expressed by education professionals in other European countries. Data are drawn principally from the 2018 edition of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and focuses on lower secondary schools. Compared to colleagues in other countries, Italian principals are more likely to indicate the inadequacy of educational spaces, buildings, and physical infrastructures; but these problems are not necessarily considered more critical than others. Conversely, Italian teachers confer greater priority to the improvement of buildings and infrastructures with respect to both their colleagues in other countries and other areas of intervention. The need to redevelop school buildings is detected across the board, regardless of the institutional and individual contexts in which education professionals work, although greater levels of inadequacy are recorded in Central and Southern Italy