The numerical limits on the cap for foreign pupils in schools

Giorgia Meloni has announced a cap on the number of foreign pupils in classes, so that Italians do not become a minority. But before introducing legislation, it would be worth looking at some figures.

Let’s start with the definition of ‘foreigner’. The Ministry of Education and Merit considers pupils who do not hold Italian citizenship to fall into this category. This category includes both children who have just arrived and those born and educated in Italy. Passports distinguish between nationalities, but educational needs do so far less clearly.

Second issue: what should the cap be? If the aim is to prevent Italians from becoming a minority, a consistent threshold would be 50 per cent. A limit of 30 or 20 per cent pursues a more restrictive objective: to ensure that they constitute a very large majority.

To assess the implications, the analysis relied on the 2024–2025 ministerial data on state primary and lower secondary schools: 21,558 school complexes, 3.67 million pupils, of whom approximately 520,000 are foreign nationals. Eighteen regions are covered; Valle d’Aosta and Trentino-Alto Adige are excluded. The data distinguishes between year groups within each school complex, but not between individual classes.

With a 20 per cent cap, the number of excess foreign pupils would be around 135,000. With a 30 per cent cap, it would be over 64,000; with a 50 per cent cap, over 12,000. The excess figures are calculated for each school complex and year group and then totalled: even the least restrictive threshold would therefore have consequences that are far from negligible.

What does ‘reallocate’ mean? Consider a school with a hundred pupils, thirty of whom are foreign nationals. With a 20 per cent cap, dividing these children across several classes solves nothing: thirty out of a hundred remains thirty out of a hundred. Arithmetic, unlike decrees, is hard to get round.

If the ten foreign pupils who were transferred were replaced by ten Italian pupils, the proportion would fall to 20 per cent. Without replacements, transferring ten would not be enough: there would still be twenty foreign pupils out of ninety, or 22.2 per cent. At least thirteen would need to be transferred.

The figures presented here are based on a one-to-one exchange, with subscriber numbers remaining unchanged and no exceptions. The total number of children affected would therefore be around 270,000 under the 20 per cent cap, 129,000 under the 30 per cent cap and 25,000 under the 50 per cent cap. However, this is a theoretical calculation, not a transfer plan: to determine whether it is feasible, it would be necessary to identify the receiving schools, check the number of places available for each year group and calculate the distances the pupils would have to travel.

Let’s take the municipality of Milan. Of the 217 school complexes considered, there are 20,537 foreign pupils out of a total of 68,650, almost 30 per cent. The breakdown by school complex and year group paints this picture.

To understand in practical terms what this would entail, let us take the two state primary schools in Milan at opposite ends of the municipal data spectrum for 2024–2025: the Setti Carraro dalla Chiesa school in Via Passione, in the Guastalla district, has the lowest percentage of pupils with non-Italian citizenship, 5 out of 231 (2.2 per cent); the Giuseppe Lombardo Radice school in Via Paravia, in the San Siro district, has the highest, 84 out of 103 (81.6 per cent). For the sake of simplicity, if we calculate the figures for the entire school complex, to bring the Lombardo Radice school down to 20 per cent, 64 foreign children would need to be transferred and replaced with an equal number of Italian children. However, the Setti Carraro school could accommodate a maximum of 41 before reaching its own limit: in return, 41 Italian children would have to move from Guastalla to San Siro. And that would not be enough, because there would still be 43 foreign pupils out of 103 at Lombardo Radice. Further schools and cross-transfers would therefore be required.

With a 20 per cent cap, even intra-city transfers would not be sufficient in Milan: the overall proportion would remain at almost 30 per cent. With pupil numbers unchanged, schools outside the municipality would need to be involved. And in primary schools alone, the average even slightly exceeds 30 per cent. Before promising a cap, it would therefore be necessary to explain who would have to travel through which neighbourhoods, and perhaps which municipal boundaries.

Which families should be excluded from their nearest school? Would the decision be based on a lottery, income, enrolment date or passport? In Boston, since 1966, the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity’s voluntary programme has enabled the city’s pupils to attend state schools in neighbouring municipalities, with funding also provided for transport. Does the government intend to fund a scheme of this kind, or to impose school transfers?

How much would it cost? The data do not specify how many new classrooms are needed. If there were sufficient capacity in the receiving schools, none might be required, but the transport costs would remain. If, on the other hand, a quarter of the surplus pupils required new capacity, with 22 pupils per class, 1.8 full-time equivalent teachers, €50,000 per year per teacher and a 20 per cent surcharge for non-teaching staff and administration, the cost would be around 166 million per year with a 20 per cent cap, 79 million with a 30 per cent cap and 15 million with a 50 per cent cap. This is a scenario, not a budget: it excludes transport, canteens and new classrooms, and does not assess where the classes could be established.

Redistribution could also have unintended consequences. Wealthier Italian families might opt for private schools, exacerbating segregation in state schools. Schools might discourage ‘problematic’ enrolments so as not to exceed the cap. Foreign children might have to travel further than their Italian classmates.

The figures therefore suggest that even the 50 per cent cap would not be without consequences. Lowering it to 20 per cent would increase the theoretical number of transfers by more than tenfold. The main issue is not how many classes to create, but which children to transfer, where, and at whose expense.

If the aim were truly to address linguistic difficulties, a more appropriate criterion would not be citizenship, but recent entry into the Italian school system. A cap applied solely to new arrivals would affect a much smaller and more concentrated group. However, not all new arrivals are unfamiliar with Italian, and not all pupils who have been here for some time have mastered it. The best criterion would therefore be a documented need for language support, not citizenship, nor, on its own, the date of arrival. However, public data from the Ministry of Education does not allow the effects to be calculated on a school-by-school basis: it records citizenship, not the date of arrival in Italy nor knowledge of Italian.

Doubts remain as to whether Meloni’s proposal is linked to competition from Roberto Vannacci on the right, his ‘remigration’ and the issue of segregated classes. The suspicion is that the government is not so much concerned that Italian children might find themselves in a minority compared to foreign children, as that the number of Fratelli d’Italia voters might fall below that of Vannacci’s supporters.