Local guidance networks in the schools of Veneto Region: governance and management

Abstract

The research has its starting point in the tenyear experience of youth guidance networks in Regione Veneto, where school’s actors and extra-school actors which collaborate to organize multiple initiatives for student guidance. The main problem which motivated the present work is the presence of heterogeneous elements in the network types, distributed in a bipolar continuum from “networks of information and collaboration”, to “cooperative networks”, with a high degree of coordination. Empirical research has focused on seven “cooperative networks”, through a series of semi-structured interviews with coordinators of the seven networks. Interviews with network coordinators allowed to reconstruct the historical background of the networks, the characteristics of their governance, coordination and communication and the role played by the coordinators themselves, identifying some success factors.