ISTAT - Educational Poverty

For the laboratory of the course “Information Design & Data Visualization” at IUSVE, ISTAT asked the entire class to create videos explaining what educational poverty is.

The project was carried out in groups and it was presented during the ISTAT Congress 2026 in Naples.

Motion Design

Illustration

“Educational poverty is defined as the deprivation of opportunities for children and adolescents to learn, experience, develop, and freely flourish their abilities, talents, and aspirations. This complex, multidimensional phenomenon is the result of family, economic, and social contexts, and is closely linked to the opportunities offered by the educational community, which includes the family, schools, associations, and other local actors.”

This is the definition of “educational poverty” and ISTAT asked us to make a video trying to convey it in the best way possible.

When discussing statistics and indicators such as educational poverty, it is often forgotten that behind all those numbers and asterisks there are real people and families facing difficulties. With this video, we therefore aimed to highlight this human dimension, while still providing a clear and accurate explanation of what educational poverty is.

For this reason, to represent all the factors that can contribute to the growth of educational poverty, we decided to use a stylized human figure.

Each factor was assigned to a part of the body, whose size increases according to how favorable the conditions are for young people’s development.

Educational poverty therefore does not take on a clearly defined form within the short film; rather, it appears as a process that prevents growth, gradually “dismantling” the character, who represents both the favorable conditions in which a person can grow and, more broadly, all of us.