Indicator history

In order to avoid the school segregation, the Circular Letter (CM) n. 2 dated 8th January 2010, issued by the MIUR (Ministry of Education, Universities and Research) offers guidelines for the management of the enrolment process for students who do not have Italian citizenship: ensuring an adequate distribution among different schools and setting the limit of foreign students with limited Italian linguistic skills to 30% per each class. The issue raised by the limit on the ethnic omposition of classes, over and above other issues, has received attention in the mass media and has been bject of debate in the public sphere. Like previous Ministry circular letters and directives, it has taken into account the need to maintain a certain level of heterogeneity among schools, as an ndispensable condition for a good level of integration and intercultural dialogue (Council of Europe, 2008).

Nonetheless, a recent document produced by the MIUR Statistical Service offered an in-depth, albeit partial, analysis of the percentage of foreigners in different primary and lower secondary schools and in single classes for a.y. 2009/2010. The analysis aimed at offering a quantitative picture of the phenomenon in light of the application of the CM n. 2/2010. In total the census was conducted on 619 schools, of which 477 were primary schools, that is to say 3.08% of the total number of primaries in the country, and 142 lower secondary schools (2.04% of the Italian total) where the percentage of foreign students exceeded 30%. What emerged was that ¼ of such primary schools are located in Lombardia and 65.5% in Lombardia, Veneto, Emilia Romagna and Piemonte. The data for lower secondary schools, on the other hand, indicated that 38% are in Lombardia and 65.5% is the three regions of Lombardia, Emila Romagna and Veneto. In the South and in the Islands only 21 schools host a foreign student population greater than 30%.

Moreover, recently, some national newspapers reported that the Invalisi test, recently added to the lower secondary school final exam (i.e., the Licenza media), might be  discriminatory towards foreign students. Among the different motivations on which this statement is founded, according to the teachers interviewed, is the fact that the use of a dictionary is not allowed and the test completion time is the same for all students (60 minutes for the Italian exam and 60 minutes for the Maths exam), independently of students’ level of Italian. In fact, exam results from the 2008/2009 a.y. have shown that foreign students really are disadvantaged: in Italian the percentage difference of correct answers is of 11% in favour of Italian students, whereas in Maths Italian students’ results are significantly lower than foreign students.

Source: Cesareo (ed.), The Sixteenth Italian Report on Migrations 2010, McGraw-Hill             

Miur, Focus in breve sulla scuola. La presenza degli alunni stranieri nelle scuole statali, Roma 2010