Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Galimberti: "Funds are an incentive to innovate and start again"

Milan, June 28 2020 – The Municipality of Milan has allocated, through a council resolution, 500 thousand euros to finance the projects of primary and lower secondary schools which aim to design new environments for teaching. In recent weeks, the Administration has signed and approved the Milan Manifesto which, together with the Regional School Office, Indire and Assodidattica, aims to implement the innovation paths that take the form of setting up new educational spaces that they adhere to targeted pedagogical projects. Through these resources, support for innovation becomes concrete and demonstrates that it takes into account the fact that educational experiments cannot ignore, indeed must start from, the revolution of school spaces which can no longer be understood in a traditional way.

Precisely for this purpose, a table is active in Milan between representatives of various institutional subjects to promote and support the challenge of changing learning environments, also because the Covid-19 emergency has accelerated the need to rethink spaces and methods of teaching also to allow the safe resumption of school activities.

“Truly innovative schools - declares Education Councilor Laura Galimberti - are those in which the design of new spaces takes place in concert with all the actors involved, the institutions, teachers, families, students, builders, trade associations and above all thinking about how environments can adapt to experiments and not vice versa. Today more than ever, in a phase in which it is unthinkable to use and experience spaces as they did before, due to safety and health needs arising from the Covid-19 emergency, these funds can be a stimulus for schools to innovate and restart . A path in which the Administration wants to be a participant and guide, transforming good intentions into concrete actions, with the awareness that a greater commitment from the Government is also needed in terms of resources for investments in schools".

The funds will be allocated to the individual school authorities through a tender that will be published shortly. Each school autonomy will be able to compete with one or two of its centers by presenting proposals for the renovation of one or more environments linked to an educational experiment to be implemented in the spaces covered by the intervention, which can be designed in synergy with companies in the sector, on the basis of the collaboration begun with the Milan Manifesto.