Italy's cabinet presents plan to overhaul school system

The Italian cabinet put forward a plan to reform the school system on Thursday, which includes measures such as hiring some 100,000 teachers on a permanent basis.

The new measures were contained in a draft law that will be discussed by lawmakers in the next month. Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said the cabinet will "urge the parliament to fast-track its works and approve it as soon as possible".

The draft law aims to change several aspects of the public school system.

The draft law proposes to strengthen the teaching of foreign languages, arts, music, and physical education for students after they entered primary school.

Special efforts will be made to hire more highly qualified language teachers for pupils in early ages, according to Renzi.

Another key point of the reform aims at stepping up professional training in upper secondary schools. Traineeships will become compulsory in the last three years of vocational and technical schools, and its length will be increased to 400 hours from the current 100 hours, according to the draft law.

Up to 200 hours of job training will be promoted in all other types of high schools.

The government seeks to replace the temporary contracts of some 100,700 teachers with a permanent one.

Candidates will have to compete for their permanent jobs as school teachers, and the number of teachers will meet exactly the vacancies in the educational system, so as to "create no more precarious teachers", Education minister Stefania Giannini said.

Despite previous announcements from the cabinet, the plan unveiled on Thursday failed to make any substantial change to teacher's career advancement system.

The current model, under which teachers get an automatic increase in salary when they reach a certain age, will remain in place. A 200-million-euro (212.44 U.S. dollars) bonus will be provided to headmasters across the country annually to reward the best teachers.

The draft law will now be discussed by the Lower House and Senate, and further changes are possible before it wins the approval.

Italy unveiled the blueprint for the "Good school" reform in September 2014. About 1.8 million people, including teachers, students and parents, are invited to contribute their input into the blueprint via public consultation which lasted for two months, according to the cabinet.

However, the project has met with opposition from a large number of students. Some 50,000 young people took to the streets on Thursday to oppose the reform, which they said would undermine the public school system. (1 euro = 1.06 dollars) Enditem