In Italian schools, from nursery to high school, there are 930,000 non-Italian pupils, representing 11.6% of the total. More than a quarter are in Lombardy (236,000, or 26%, an increase of 15,000 over four years), followed by Emilia-Romagna (112,839), Veneto (94,669), Lazio (80,051) and Piedmont (78,039). In terms of cities, the one with the highest number of non-Italian students is Milan with 79,039, followed by Rome (63,782), Turin (39,465) and Brescia (32,747). These are figures from the latest report by Ismu, Initiatives and Studies on Human Mobility.
Presence is lower in the south, where however the number of unaccompanied minors is higher: while the largest number in this case is also found in Milan (over one thousand), Catania comes second with 745.
Non-Italian students face greater difficulties also because they find themselves in disadvantaged circumstances: the risk of implicit dropout is higher, at 22.5% compared to 11.6% for Italian students. However, some changes are being recorded. For example, the presence of foreign students in high schools is growing, especially among those born in Italy, although a gap still remains. At middle school level, over 50% of Italian students plan to enrol in a liceo, but only 38.3% of foreign students do. Regarding academic performance, the Invalsi Report showed that foreign students in their third year of middle school score 22.6 points lower in Italian and 13.5 points lower in mathematics; as they continue their studies, the gap in mathematics disappears while the one in Italian remains, whereas in English language tests non-Italian students achieve better results.
According to another study, by Idos, over the past 11 years the presence of students with foreign citizenship has grown by 16%, against a decline of 12.5% among native students, also stemming the haemorrhage linked to the demographic decline that has brought the total number of pupils from almost 9 million in 2014 to around 8 million today (-9.9%). Of the approximately 931,000 foreign students, almost two thirds (65.2%, equal to over 607,000) were born in Italy: eleven years ago they were just over half (51.7%).
Half of enrolled foreign students are distributed across the 5 main nationalities: Romanian, Albanian, Moroccan, Chinese and Egyptian; the remainder are spread across many dozens of other nationalities.
