Lessons learnt from the Italian experience of distance learning: Some useful indications for future policies on ICT in school systems

During the pandemic the majority of the states instituted measures to close schools and shift them to virtual platforms. This change happened in school systems that could rely on different infrastructures and levels of digitisation achieved so far. Starting from an analysis of the literature on distance learning, the paper will reconstruct its effects on the Italian school system and will give indications useful for the development of digital educational policies. In partic-ular, with regard to the first aspect, the focus will be on the consequences of distance learning on three important dimensions that characterise school sys-tems and directly involve teachers and students: school inclusion (Aroldi, Zaf-faroni and Cino, 2021), learning processes (Giancola and Piromalli, 2020) and digital skills (Castellana and Rossi, 2021). Distance learning has functioned as an amplifier of both the criticalities and opportunities offered by the digitisation of the education system. Overcoming the former to strengthen the latter should be the starting point for the re-calibration of educational policies which, as we shall see, must be implemented starting from the centrality and relevance of the relational dimension in educational environments on which not only a suc-cessful learning process depends, but also the well-being of students and teachers.