The term CLIL, introduced by David Marsh and Anne Maljers in 1994, is an acronym for Content and Language Integrated Learning.
The upper secondary school reform law that came into effect in 2010 introduced CLIL into the Italian school system. As far as its implementation is concerned, INDIRE has played a crucial role in the plan to train teachers of non-linguistic subjects endorsed by the MIUR’s Directorate General for School Staff.
The Institute promotes and supports the introduction of CLIL in Italy by means of a series of actions and initiatives, including:

• surveys carried out through the Eurydice network on foreign languages and the CLIL method;
• the repository of schools’ experiences represented by the “GOLD” system, which allows the collection and sharing of good practices in CLIL;
• the “eTwinning” programme, which enables exchange and virtual twinning of schools in different countries, to swap opinions and collaborate on various themes including CLIL.

The profile of a CLIL teacher means possession of linguistic-communicative skills in a C1 level vehicular foreign language, as well as methodological-teaching skills acquired after a specialist university course worth 60 ECTS for teachers beginning their training and 20 ECTS for tenured teachers.
This method is gaining ground all over Europe, as testified by the Eurydice Report Keydata on Languages at school in Europe (2012) and the Recommendation of the European Commission Rethinking Education (2012), in which linguistic competence in a foreign language is defined as a key aspect for the modernisation of European educational systems, and  CLIL method has shown to be a powerful driving force for the renewal and improvement of school curricula.

INDIRE is also the Italian representative of EUN – European Schoolnet, a consortium consisting of 31 European Ministries of Education, which sponsor a series of initiatives and projects on a vast range of topics as part of internationalisation and innovation, including the teaching of subjects in a foreign language, above all for the STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths) through the use of multimedia and multimodal technologies.