Istituto Comprensivo Pietro Vanni

Pietro Vanni Institute is a public middle school, with about five hundred students aged 11 to 14 and fifty teachers. The school is part of a comprehensive institute that includes a kindergarten with eighty children and a primary school with about a hundred and ninety children.
The school is located in Viterbo, a city of Etruscan and Roman origins. Viterbo is 80 Km north of Rome. Its economy is mainly based on agricultural products and on public services. Viterbo also has a university (well know for its Faculty of Agriculture), which is a cultural and economic stimulus for the area.
Developing citizenship awareness, responsibility and self-regulation skills are the main goals of the Institute, which is working to affirm the central role of school in society to counteract social and cultural inequalities, to prevent school abandon, to create an open school as a permanent laboratory for research, experimentation and didactic innovation, to guarantee integration and equal opportunities, even to special need students, for a successful education as citizens.

Our school is involved in several projects and has a very proactive and tireless teaching team:

• School Library Project, addressed to Middle School students to develop the awareness of cultural identity, and support the habit and pleasure of reading, learning and using libraries throughout life. Parents collaboration is essential in any activity proposed, for instance, the Christmas market, or the Nativity contest "The crib in my class". It also involves the Projects "Famous people from Viterbo" (primary and middle school, focused on the study of local history through the stories of the most famous characters of our town, the project “Meeting with Archeology”, in partnership with the cultural association “Archeotuscia”, whose goal is to let the students know the Etruscan and Roman heritage of our territory, and the project “Meeting with Dialect Poets” in collaboration with Barbanera Academy, aiming to make teenagers aware of the roots of their everyday language.
• With other schools in the province, head Liceo Scientifico "Ruffini" in Viterbo, collaboration to encourage innovative, teaching processes and workshops about Mathematics, Biology, Physics and Chemistry, and also the Project to prevent social disease in adolescence. It aims to facilitate family-to-school dialogue with the help of a psychologist and it also supports the commitment and merit of students.

Our school also has several conventions and collaborations with local partners.
• Convention with the Revenue Agency concerning "Taxes and School", the activities organised are related to the development of the culture of legality and sense of civic and social responsibility
• Convention with the American School YEAR ABROAD in Viterbo, for a collaboration, to develop communicative skills in the English language through the presence of American students in the third classes of the middle school.
• Collaboration with the Pathological dependence service of the Health Service to help teenagers to prevent drugs and alcohol addiction.
• With particular reference to Citizenship, Constitution and Legality, the school also asks for the collaboration of the Police (meetings to discuss of bullying and cyberbullying, and Firefighters (behaviour in case of fire, earthquakes).
• Cooperation with the "Caffeine" Cultural Foundation, implementing the Institute's participation in the cultural activities of the area.
• The collaboration with the "Saint Thomas" International Institute of Viterbo represents a proposal for collaboration in the Erasmus project "Training in the Schools" partner with Lithuania and Norway, on education to citizenship.
As far as the quality system is concerned, our school takes part in annual national self-assessment process which ends with the publication of the so-called RAV (Self-assessment Report).
The self-assessment process is aimed at :
• identifying enhancement areas inside the school
• providing a presentation of the school through an accurate analysis of its performance
• establishing the development priorities for the next year
The focal point of this process consists in the contemporary presence of both an external and an internal assessment which is deeply connected in order to maintain and reinforce the positive aspects and to identify and ameliorate the negative ones.
RAV is divided into three macro-areas :
1.Social Context
2.Educational attainment
3. Two main Process areas:
a. Educational and didactical practice
b. Management and organization practice
and it ends in :
4. Self-evaluation process
5. Identification of priorities of improvement.