Almost 900 Schools in Italy Now Have More Migrant Pupils than Native Italians
In Italy, foreign-born pupils represent around 10.3 percent of pupils
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Eight hundred and eighty schools across Italy now have more foreign-born pupils than native Italians, according to the latest statistics.
Italian schools with over 50 percent foreign-born pupils have grown from 805 to 880 in 2021, with more than half of the schools being kindergartens.
At least 8.4 percent of kindergartens in Italy now have over 30 percent of foreign-born pupils.
In Italy, foreign-born pupils represent around 10.3 percent of all students.
According to the newspaper Il Giornale, that number equates to 877,000 pupils out of 8,484,000 who attended an Italian school in the last year.
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The 10.3 percent figure showed a large increase since 2018 when it was just 9.4 percent.
Three thousand eight hundred nine schools across Itay have rates of 30 percent or more migrant children.
That is 6.8 percent of the total number of schools in the country, up from 5.3 percent in 2016/2017.
The region of Lombardy has the highest number of schools, with migrant populations over 30 percent.
But Emilia-Romagna has the highest proportion with 16.2 percent, which exceeds the 30 percent migrant pupil threshold.
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To facilitate integration efforts, the 30 percent migrant student threshold was set up by the Italian Ministry of Education in 2010, according to Il Giornale.
According to a study published in 2018, Milan reportedly saw 56 percent of Italian parents in the city enrolling their children into non-catchment area schools in order to avoid them.
Milanese teachers also noted problems with teaching foreign children.
Teachers, parents, and school administrators said in a letter to Milan’s Mayor Beppe Sala:
“Over the past five years, there has been a considerable increase in the concentration of children with non-native speakers and from other countries that do not understand and do not speak Italian."
Across Europe, most notably Germany, schools have migrant-background populations far higher than just 30 percent and some 99 percent, such as the Schoeneberg Spreewald Elementary School in Berlin.
