ITALIAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

This article illustrates the main results of the only three quantitative surveys regarding Italy’s headteachers in the last ten years. The surveys produced different typologies identifying how headteachers’ perception of their role has developed. The 1997 and 2000 surveys enabled the construction of a panel of 500 headteachers, interviewed three years prior to the attainment of school autonomy and when it received legal recognition. It was thus possible to understand how the profound change from headteachers as ministerial bureaucrats to autonomous school headteachers, co-operative and transformational leaders was adopted by the interested parties. Besides studying headteachers’ attitudes after eight years’ experimentation of the new role, the third survey has the advantage of providing a comparison and mutual assessment between headteachers and their teachers. The three surveys highlight both a positive development in the willingness of headteachers to accept an innovative role and the potential willingness of teachers to collaborate: the really serious problem in Italy in these years is the lack of schools policies which not only have not aided in the development of school autonomy after its introduction, but actually appear to have forgotten it, almost as if it were some legacy left over from the end of the century, impossible to eliminate, but which it would be preferable to put aside.