The future has early roots: learning outcomes and school effectiveness in Tuscany’s primary education system

Our aim is to describe the main determinants of grade 5 pupils’ outcomes, disentangling the role of individual characteristics (demographic, social, economic and cultural) from those of schools. Such factors may be usefully divided into two categories: externally determined factors (average characteristics of pupils who are attending the school, such as socio-economic status of pupils, nationality, but also quality and quantity of school resources, which in Italy are mainly managed by the Ministry of Education (MIUR)) and characteristics which are in principle controlled by the school itself. To this end, we adopt a multilevel regression model, which properly takes into account the hierarchical structure of data (pupils nested within schools) by partitioning the residual variance into pupils and school components.