ROME (Reuters) - Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi won a Senate confidence vote on a fiercely contested schools reform bill on Thursday, after opposition parties and the left-wing of the premier's own Democratic Party (PD) tabled thousands of amendments.
Senators in the upper house voted in favour by 159 votes, with 112 against. Angry shouts rang out during and after the vote in the upper house Senate, which was open to the public.
The bill includes increasing the power of school managers to hire and promote teachers, offering tax breaks for private schools and permanently hiring some 100,000 supply teachers.
The Chamber of Deputies must now give the bill a final reading. Renzi wants the reform to be approved definitively in the first half of July.
(Reporting by Isla Binnie, editing by Gavin Jones)
