Inclusive teachers in Italy: professional profiles and training paths

Italy has a long-standing tradition of integrating children and students with special educational needs into mainstream classrooms and has been committed for years to implementing inclusive policies. Over time, a series of regulations has contributed to defining teachers’ professional profiles and the corresponding training pathways. This paper offers a critical and reflective analysis of these profiles and their related training programs. The analysis reveals a good degree of consistency among professional profiles established over time for different school levels, when referring to the same teaching role. However, significant discrepancies emerge between the expected competences of general education teachers and those required for support teachers. For support teachers, in particular, various pathways to the profession are provided by diverse training agencies. In this case, despite formally similar professional profiles upon completion, the training routes differ substantially, often justified by the varying professional backgrounds of participants. In light of this variability, there is a growing call for the establishment of a national monitoring system to ensure the effective equivalence of outcomes in terms of the competences actually acquired.