Contributing to the dissemination of quality and accessible educational tools is not only one of the Group’s business activities: it is the most consistent way with the company mission to adhere to the Sustainable Development Goals identified by the UN (SDG 4: Ensuring inclusive and equal quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Group’s school textbook publishers acted quickly and effectively with a big project to enable and facilitate Distance Learning for everyone. 

Over the past few years, the issue of digital teaching has represented an element of “continuity in the emergency”, since it is an established situation that marks the everyday life of the current pandemic context.

The actions taken during the emergency, in 2020, were rationalized and structured in order to give the Group’s parties and stakeholders (teachers, students, households, etc.) a tangible response and a modus operandi that has become, in a context of uncertainty and discomfort, an integral part of everyday life.

Some elements and initiatives, which were of an emergency nature during the first year of the pandemic, became structural in the Publisher’s offering during 2021.

The product range of the educational publishing houses Mondadori Education and Rizzoli Education has been enriched with new products, as well as tools, solutions and support services: renewed guides for teachers, tools to support integrated teaching, content and texts dedicated to special educational needs, customizable materials for teachers designed for tests, programming and lessons in digital education and inclusive teaching. Special attention was paid to the continuity of teaching, both in-person and distance learning. Integration between digital and traditional teaching tools was enhanced, addressing the need for a skillful and effective mix of textbooks and digital content.

Materials were designed and made available to teachers that are usable and adaptable to both teaching modes. The Group’s textbook publishers, with their 2021 productions, offered versatile and comprehensive materials focusing on providing tangible reference points and solid planning tools in the uncertainty of the context.

2021 was the year in which many of the topics, referring to the framework of the 2030 Agenda, were made explicit and found their daily dimension, not only as an element of content and teaching analysis in the textbooks, but also with tangible initiatives on the part of the two publishing houses. Thus, the topic of sustainability, inclusion, gender equality, quality education, cultural impoverishment and school dropout, and the promotion of reading and content responsibility, were addressed from a variety of perspectives and contexts.

In 2021 the Group acquired D Scuola, which joins the two publishing houses Mondadori Education and Rizzoli Education, which boast an extensive catalogue of around 30 brands, including owned and distributed brands, and production that covers every sector, from pre-school to university publishing.

Some of the initiatives promoted by the Rizzoli Education publishing house were:

  • Inclusion, throughout production, of recurring fact sheets on the topics of the 2030 Agenda and related to civil education
  • Consolidation of the strong partnership with Erickson, a leading publisher in the dissemination of topics related to inclusivity for primary and first-level secondary schools
  • “Equality Objective" for primary schools: supervision, by gender educators, of passages, illustrations and language used, to ensure gender-balanced representation
  • Launch of the “Manifesto per la parità di genere e pluralità” (see section on "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion"): a project that promotes the themes of gender equality, multi-culture, new models of families and inclusion. The project included internal training dedicated to news desks and a cycle of free events for teachers

The two publishing houses of the Mondadori Group have also significantly enriched the product range of HUB Scuola, the platform dedicated to digital teaching, complementing the offer with new tools and content for integrated digital teaching, while investing in user support services.

Specifically, the offering of lesson plans and digital lessons was completed, through the inclusion of numerous learning paths that integrate digital resources and materials from published textbooks. Equally wide, in terms of educational coverage, is the proposal from HUB Test, which allows tests on almost all the topical areas covered, thanks to the presence of 60 subjects and over 55,000 questions available, for teachers and students. To facilitate access to content, efforts focused on everyday tools and platforms such as smartphones, QR-codes, Google Forms, Google Drive, and YouTube.

Additionally, the knowledge-base of HUB Scuola was developed and reorganized to cover an increasing number of aspects in support of users and a virtual assistant solution was adopted, a tutorial bot, that is, a virtual tutor able to support and guide users in the use of the main features of the platform.

The initiatives promoted by the Mondadori Education publishing house include:

  • “La Lettura al centro” project: a complete set of proposals and tools to make reading central to teaching activities in all schools. The project also includes the initiative “Gli scrittori fanno scuola”, developed in association with Mondadori Ragazzi
  • “#Leparolechesiamo, la scuola che vogliamo” project, implemented in 2021, which led schools throughout the country to consider and work on issues of innovation, sustainability and inclusion, with particular attention to gender equality