The next Council of Ministers meeting is scheduled for Thursday at 4:30 p.m., according to sources. The agenda has yet to be finalised, but the government is working to present on that occasion the school regulations announced yesterday by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, which include a maximum cap on foreign pupils per class and a ban on wearing the burqa and niqab. The legislative vehicle, according to sources, is expected to be a government-initiated bill with specific school provisions drawn up by the Ministry of Education.
In Italy, one pupil wearing a burqa for every 660 classes
Generally fewer than 1% of Muslim women wear the full veil, the burqa, meaning an estimated 500-600 foreign female pupils who, in all likelihood, wear the burqa in Italian schools. Dividing the 500-600 foreign pupils wearing the burqa by the number of existing Italian classes, the resulting figure is one pupil wearing a burqa for every 660 classes. The figures were compiled by the specialist publication La Tecnica della scuola.
Cap on foreign pupils in class, Save The Children: 'Children are not numbers'
"Children are not numbers. The quality of schooling is not built through numerical thresholds for certain students, but by investing in educational provision for all." This is the statement made by Save The Children regarding the announced introduction of a cap on the number of foreign pupils in classes. "You cannot draw a hard line on the blackboard that," commented Giorgia D'Errico, Director of Institutional Relations at Save the Children, "separates Italian and foreign pupils: applying a percentage cap while ignoring the residential concentration in peripheral areas and classifying as 'foreign' pupils who were born in Italy is a bureaucratic paradox that risks stigmatising certain students on the basis of citizenship and fuelling the flight of families towards other schools, worsening segregation. It is instead necessary to reflect on the risks of school segregation that emerge in higher-complexity contexts, especially in large urban areas, questioning the effectiveness of support tools and the resources made available to schools." As regards the ban on wearing the full veil in class, "it would first of all be important," she added, "to have data on the incidence of niqab or burqa use in compulsory schooling in order to define the scale of the issue being discussed, which otherwise risks appearing as an attack on a specific religious identity. In any case, the fact remains that a measure of this kind would risk encouraging paths of isolation and dropout among some girls and compromising the full exercise of the right to education."
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