Abstract

Starting from descriptive evidence that Italy is a country characterised by late scholarisation, we show that the lack of educational attainments in the population has to do with both quantity and quality. With respect to quality, we show that deficiencies are concentrated in technical and vocational schools. Using data from the PISA 2000 survey, we analyse the role played by family background in the formation of competences, and we show that once we control for it the differences between school types attenuates up to disappear when we introduce also resources available to different school types. We also investigate territorial differences between North and South Italy, arguing that resource differences may be responsible for this outcome.