School Quality. French and Italian Pupils’ Perspectives

The aim of this article was to examine students’ perspectives on the process of school evaluation. We believe it is an underexplored issue. We tried to deal with this theme in two national contexts to facilitate an international collaboration and perspective Following on from Rudduck’s approach and that of the Student Voice Movement, the aim of our research is to understand what kind of school quality pupils look for. The first part of this article is dedicated to educational contexts and political specificities of Italian and French school evaluation systems. The second part deals with the results of an empirical survey. In a comparative perspective, 300 questionnaires were distributed to Italian and French students in middle school. A content and an interpretative analysis were conducted on 275 questionnaires. Results show that three dimensions characterize the idea of quality of school from a students perspective: the quality of the teacher, the quality of education offered, the school structures and organization. Furthermore, our students seemed to consider social, affective and emotive factors of the school as the most important aspects for school quality, more that the “academic” ones. Working on indicators of school quality is part of understanding the factors that are often invisible and/or indirect in terms of how it affects the wellbeing of students. We believe such indicators should be considered and discussed at the political level.