Teacher salaries may vary by region says Valditara, sparking row

(ANSA) - ROME, JAN 26 - Education Minister Giuseppe Valditara said Thursday that Italian teachers' pay structure may be reformed so that salaries vary from region to region and he also mooted private forms of funding for Italian State schools, sparking outrage from opposition parties and trade unions .
    "The State school system needs new forms of funding, including for teachers' salaries, which may become differentiated on a regional basis," Valditara told an event organized by PwC and the Gedi group.
    "It's necessary to find new roads, including experimental ones, of synergy between the industrial system, civil society and schools in order to finance education".
    Francesco Sinopoli, the secretary of the Flc Cgil trade union, said differentiating teacher salaries on the basis of the varying cost of living in different regions would "take us back 50 years.
    "The combination of the entry of private entities and the disarticulation of the contractual system amounts to the destruction of public schooling," Sinopoli told ANSA.
    "It's the worst thing you could do".
    Peppe Provenzano of the opposition centre-left Democratic Party (PD) said Valditara's proposals "definitively split" Italy.
    5-Star Movement (M5S) lawmakers Luca Pirondini and Anna Laura Orrico said Valditara had "thrown off his mask" and shown that he wanted a "school system of inequality".
    However, Mario Rusconi, the head of the Rome section of school principals association ANP, said it would be "sensible" to raise teachers' salaries in northern regions where the cost of living is higher. (ANSA).