Italy’s educational system is predominately public.  Besides schools for infants, only 5% of students attend private schools, and these long-standing, traditional private institutions are characterized as denominational.  Other than the public and private sectors, new recent laws allow for citizens, family members and other social entities to directly intervene in the management of educational services.  This new development of social participation in Italy allows for avenues of growth, probably bringing the Italian educational system to new heights, involving families to the point where they are privy to services offered, and, therefore, giving schools a greater competitive edge for attracting students.
What are the institutional and organizational characteristics of these emerging schools?
How do these schools differentiate themselves from the institutional models, i.e. state and denominational/private?
More specifically, what are the characteristic aspects in relation to finalism, governance, stakeholder relations and teacher management?
This paper responds to the above questions through an online questionnaire completed by a sample of approximately 200 Italian schools. In particular, this survey looked at the management of educational activities, student, family, and stakeholder relations, human resources and governance, or rather the decision-making system and accountability. 

The term New Public Management (NPM) is used to describe managerial reforms in the public sector, which have taken place within the last twenty years.  NPM has been established as an international trend, even spreading to the European continent where political, administrative and institutional systems are different from the Anglo-Saxon countries where NPM originated.
This paper analyzes the substance of NPM with a specific focus on the educational sector, analyzing and comparing its evolutionary steps.
Within the educational sector NPM cannot be considered a uniform, monolithic block, but be characterized by evolutionary steps originating with managerial, business-like practices (managerialism), moving towards the introduction of q.-market models (marketization) and finishing with public governance, the most recent paradigm. 
This paper considers the necessity of bringing the scientific discussion and educational reform into the new paradigm, which is increasingly closer to schools’ nature and organizational culture.
Scholastic leadership has to respond to a model of network management where collaboration and persuasion take the place of the hierarchy not only in relationship to outside stakeholders, but also in managing schools human resources.
On these bases follow Italian empirical evidence on the emerging paradigm of school management and leadership.