“Dad, is it true they want to put a limit on foreign children in classrooms?”

If my son asked me that question, I would probably answer with another one.

“How do you get along with your foreign classmates?”

I already know the answer.

Fine.

He spends time with some of them outside school too.

That does not mean the problem of integration does not exist.

At his school there have been children who arrived without knowing Italian and cried because they could not communicate.

That is a real problem.

But I also saw what happened afterward.

The teachers did extraordinary work.

They did exactly what a school should do: they took a child who did not yet have the tools needed to belong to that community and helped him enter it.

That is why a sentence Giorgia Meloni said on September 20, 2026 struck me.

The Prime Minister announced a measure that is expected to introduce a maximum number of foreign students per class, require parents of foreign students with serious difficulties integrating into school to learn Italian, and ban burqas and niqabs in schools.

On September 21, according to ANSA, the Government was working to bring the measures before the Council of Ministers through a government-sponsored bill. As I write, the final text is not yet available, so it would be wrong to attribute details to it that we do not yet know.

We can, however, discuss the premise.

Meloni said:

“There is no way Italian children should be the ones feeling pushed into a corner in their own classroom because they have become the minority.”

And it was precisely that expression — feeling pushed into a corner — that took me back thirty-four years.

In 1992, I was the one who needed to integrate

I arrived in Italy from Switzerland in September 1992.

I had already started first grade and should have continued my schooling here.

That didn't happen.

I do not remember enough to reconstruct the administrative reasons precisely today, and I do not want to invent them. I know my parents did not have the tools they needed to navigate the system. But I also know the system failed to find a solution for a six-year-old child who spoke Italian and had already started school.

I stayed home for a year.

The following year I finally entered first grade.

I was a year older than my classmates.

What I remember from my first day is a yellow folder, a sort of tiny briefcase.

I remember being mocked.

Then snack time came.

I had a banana.

The others pulled out huge sandwiches and packaged snacks.

Small memories.

Almost insignificant to an adult.

Not to a child.

At seven, I had the feeling that I came from a different system, one that to my eyes seemed more organized, and that I had to adapt quickly to something I did not know.

I was the strange one.

Not because I couldn't speak Italian.

Not because I was Muslim.

Not because I wore anything unusual.

I wasn't even a foreigner.

And yet I was the different one.

I remember another child too.

He was a Jehovah's Witness.

During some birthday celebrations he would stay outside the classroom.

I don't want to judge his family's choices today through memories that are more than thirty years old.

But I remember his face.

I remember his discomfort.

And most of all, I remember what I felt when I looked at him.

I don't think I had ever seen anyone feel so alone.

Perhaps that is why today, before asking how many foreign students can be in a classroom, I feel the need to ask myself a different question:

what should a school do when a child risks being left outside?

Italian schools have more serious problems than students' passports

I want to be very clear on this point.

If many children who do not know Italian well enough arrive in the same classroom at the same time, there is a teaching problem.

It takes time, specific skills, resources and teachers who are given the conditions to deal with it.

Denying that would be ideological.

What I challenge is the idea that the major problem facing Italian schools can be summarized by the number of foreign children in a classroom.

Because Italian schools have deeper problems.

Buildings that need upgrading.

Teachers from whom we keep asking more.

Families trying to reconcile school calendars with work.

Economic and social divides.

Young people reaching adulthood without basic tools to navigate the world.

A still-difficult relationship between education and work.

A labor market changing at enormous speed because of artificial intelligence.

And above all, classrooms made up of children who are different from one another, each with needs that cannot be inferred from a passport.

You cannot measure a difficult classroom by counting foreign students

According to estimates by Fondazione ISMU, in the 2023/24 school year there were around 930,000 students without Italian citizenship, 11.6% of the school population.

But it is important to understand what that definition actually means.

A very significant share of students without Italian citizenship were born in Italy. In Ministry of Education data for 2022/23 cited by ISMU, students born in Italy accounted for 65.4% of those without Italian citizenship.

Legally, they are foreign nationals.

But many were born here.

They grew up here.

They have attended our schools since early childhood.

They speak Italian.

They may even speak with the accent of the city where they grew up.

A child with a foreign passport who was born and raised in Altamura does not necessarily present a school with the same challenge as a child who arrived three months ago and still cannot understand a word of Italian.

It is interesting that even the ministerial circular of January 8, 2010 — the one that introduced a benchmark ceiling of 30% of students without Italian citizenship per class — allowed exceptions precisely on the basis of language proficiency.

The ceiling could be raised when foreign students had adequate language skills and lowered when their knowledge of Italian did not allow effective participation in lessons.

That was 2010.

So even then one thing was already clear:

citizenship and language needs are not the same thing.

But I would like to push the reasoning one step further.

Because Italian citizenship and the absence of educational needs are not the same thing either.

An Italian child may have a specific learning disorder.

They may have language or cognitive difficulties.

They may be living through a complicated family situation.

They may be experiencing psychological distress.

They may have behavioral problems.

They may be growing up in an economically or culturally fragile environment.

They may need far more attention than a foreign classmate who was born in Italy, speaks perfect Italian and has no particular difficulties.

I am not equating different needs.

I am saying something very simple:

a classroom is not made of passports. It is made of children.

So the educational question should not only be:

how many foreign students are there?

It should also be:

how many different needs does that classroom have to manage, and what resources does the school have to do it?

A child does not create a teaching difficulty because they hold a foreign passport.

They may create one because they do not know the language, because they need support or because they are going through a difficult period.

Exactly as an Italian child can.

PISA data tells a more complicated story too

PISA 2022 offers an important piece of evidence.

In Italy, 52% of students with an immigrant background covered by the survey were socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Among all students covered by PISA, the figure was 25%.

In addition, 59% of students with an immigrant background reported that the language they mainly spoke at home was different from the language used in the test.

So yes: language matters.

Family context matters.

Integration matters.

Students with an immigrant background initially had lower average scores in mathematics and reading.

But the OECD adds a crucial detail: once socioeconomic status was taken into account, the difference in mathematics in Italy was no longer statistically significant.

The same was true for reading.

This does not prove that immigration cannot create challenges for schools.

It shows how risky it is to compress different phenomena into the single word “foreigners.”

Inside that word there may be language problems.

Poverty.

Family vulnerability.

Residential segregation.

Difficulties with integration.

The school's ability to compensate for disadvantage.

If we get the diagnosis wrong, we are unlikely to find the right treatment.

I have seen children excluded. Not always because they were foreign

At my children's school, there was a case in which a child risked being excluded from an extracurricular activity.

Not because he was foreign.

Not because he belonged to a particular religion.

Because his family could not afford it.

When I found out, I suggested to the other parents that we divide his fee among us.

I am not telling this story to give myself a medal.

It simply seemed like the normal thing to do.

Because a child does not know our sophisticated classifications.

He only sees that his classmates are doing something.

And he isn't.

So I inevitably return to that Jehovah's Witness child outside my classroom.

The reasons change.

But to an eight-year-old, the result can be identical:

I am outside and everyone else is inside.

Perhaps the ABC of living in the world begins right there.

Above all, I want schools to produce people who know how to live in the world

Before asking myself what kinds of professionals schools should train, I ask what kinds of people they should help build.

I would like schools to teach the ABC of living in the world.

Emotional and sex education.

Financial education.

Nutrition.

Philosophy, not only as the history of philosophers but as a habit of thought.

The ability to understand a contract.

The ability to cook yourself a meal.

Awareness of your own body.

The ability to speak and listen.

An understanding of consent.

Respect for rules.

Respect for others.

Responsibility.

Autonomy.

The ability to recognize manipulation.

If we built young people who were culturally solid, capable of thinking and committed to finding their place in the world, I wonder how much it should really concern them that the classmate sitting beside them follows a different religion.

I can wear a crucifix around my neck.

Someone else can be Muslim.

Someone else can be an atheist.

Why should one person's identity pose a threat to another's?

Secularism does not mean erasing religion

I grew up with an extremely strict Christian education.

I was an altar boy.

My father served as an extraordinary minister of Holy Communion.

My children have not been baptized.

They have received no sacraments.

They have not attended catechism classes.

Not because I want to educate them against religion.

Exactly the opposite.

I would like them, one day, to have enough tools to decide for themselves whether to believe, what to believe and how.

For me, school must be secular.

Full stop.

That does not mean every behavior must be allowed in the name of religion.

A small personal religious symbol and a garment that covers the face completely do not necessarily raise the same questions of identification, security and educational relationships.

Rules can exist.

But they should be general, reasoned and equal for everyone.

Secularism should not serve to protect one religion from another.

It should protect everyone's freedom.

Meanwhile, some school buildings need to be rethought

My children's school was declared unfit for use and they were moved to another building.

I do not want to use this story to assign blame to the municipality, the administration or anyone in particular.

That isn't the point.

The point is the consequences I see as a father.

The spaces are not equivalent.

To do sports, the children have to take a bus to the other side of the city.

The spaces are not adequate for some collective activities either.

An end-of-year performance was held outside, under the June sun.

A girl fainted.

So the question I ask myself is not about Altamura.

It is about Italy.

How many school buildings need to be renovated, upgraded, expanded, air-conditioned or simply rethought for the way children should live and learn today?

Because my son does not take a bus to play sports because there are too many foreign students in his class.

And who is supposed to manage all this complexity? Teachers

Teachers.

People from whom we keep asking more.

According to the OECD, in 2024 the average actual salary of Italian primary-school teachers was 33% lower than that of full-time workers with tertiary education.

Across the OECD, the gap was 17%.

From 2015 to 2024, moreover, average real salaries for primary-school teachers rose by 14.6% across the OECD, while in Italy they fell by 4.4%.

Then we ask them to teach.

Help children who do not speak Italian catch up.

Manage fragile family situations.

Address different educational needs.

Deal with parents.

Keep their own skills up to date.

Use new tools.

Understand artificial intelligence.

Educate, not only instruct.

And often they still manage to do the extraordinary work I have personally seen them do with children who arrived without knowing the language.

Before asking how many foreign students can be in a classroom, perhaps it is worth asking:

how many tools do we give the teacher who has to manage that classroom?

Then June arrives. Parents' jobs don't end in June

Here too, it is worth starting from the data.

It is not accurate to say that Italy overall has an abnormal number of weeks of school vacation compared with other OECD countries: in primary school there are 13.8 weeks of breaks across the whole year, compared with an OECD average of 13.5.

The Italian problem is mainly how those weeks are distributed.

The OECD Economic Survey: Italy 2026 notes that, in the comparison referring to 2023, Italy's end-of-school-year break lasts about 13 consecutive weeks, compared with 8.9 weeks on average across the OECD.

And this is where the statistic becomes daily life.

School ends.

Work doesn't.

We do not have grandparents who can look after the children on a regular basis.

We do not have a family network to rely on.

In July we enroll them in a summer camp.

And pay for it.

Then August arrives.

And after August there is still part of September.

Daniele is now old enough to stay alone sometimes.

The younger one isn't.

So I wake him early because I have to go to the office.

I take him with me.

I give him something to draw.

Or, inevitably, he ends up in front of a screen.

Meanwhile I have to work and hope I do not have meetings incompatible with having a child there.

Around lunchtime I stop.

Groceries.

I cook.

We eat.

Then we start again.

I can do this because I am self-employed.

And I keep asking myself one very simple question:

what do two salaried parents, with no grandparents and no money for weeks of babysitters or summer camps, do?

Parental leave exists. But who can actually use it?

Parental leave has been expanded in recent years.

That should be acknowledged.

But looking only at what the law formally provides is not enough to understand how it is used in real life.

According to INPS, in 2024, among private-sector employees, 289,409 women and just over 124,000 men used parental leave.

Women used it for an average of 53 days.

Men for 22.

Fathers' participation is increasing: between 2023 and 2024, the number of men using leave rose by 28.5%.

That is positive.

But the distance remains enormous.

I do not pretend it can be reduced to a single cause.

There are pay differences within couples, family organization, care culture, working conditions and probably many other variables.

The question that interests me is this:

what economic, cultural and workplace conditions are needed for a father to genuinely use parental leave without the family paying the price?

Because a law can recognize a right.

But there can be an enormous distance between being entitled to exercise it on paper and being able to do so in practice.

And then we wonder why fewer and fewer children are being born

If we are worried that there may be too few Italian children in some classrooms in the future, there is one figure that is impossible to ignore.

In 2025 around 355,000 children were born in Italy.

Fifteen thousand fewer than in 2024.

The average number of children per woman fell to 1.14.

There were 652,000 deaths.

As of January 1, 2026, children and young people up to age 14 represented just 11.6% of the Italian population.

People over 65 represented 25.1%.

I do not attribute all of this to the current Government.

That would be unfair.

Italy's falling birth rate goes back a long way and has complex economic, cultural, social and demographic causes.

Indeed, ISTAT now highlights an even harder mechanism to reverse: decades of low fertility have reduced the size of the very generations that could become parents today.

But precisely for that reason politics, whatever government is in office, should have one obsession:

making it possible to have children.

Housing.

Work.

Income.

Services.

Childcare.

Leave.

School.

Time.

That is why, when I hear people talk about the risk of Italian children becoming a minority, another question comes to me first:

how many Italian children will there be?

And before even that:

have we built a country in which deciding to have them is a reasonable choice?

Because sooner or later those children are supposed to become adults too

Here I stop speaking as a father for a moment.

And speak as an entrepreneur.

I receive résumés.

I interview people.

I look for people to hire.

And what I see does not reassure me.

Résumés sent without even two lines of introduction.

Candidates who arrive at an interview without having researched the company.

I once had a candidate ask us directly what our company did.

I have met marketing graduates unable to speak concretely about market analysis, advertising, copywriting, landing pages and the kinds of work a company like mine performs every day.

At the same time, some professions are already changing radically because of artificial intelligence.

I myself can now carry out activities independently for which I would once have needed other people.

And when schools try to enter companies, at least in my experience, the connection does not always work as it should.

School-to-work programs exist. But where is the project?

Today they are called PCTO: Percorsi per le competenze trasversali e per l'orientamento, pathways for transversal skills and career guidance.

On paper, the model is much more structured than what sometimes arrives in a company in practice.

Ministry guidelines provide for a school tutor and a tutor from the host organization.

They provide for the two to work together on designing, organizing and evaluating the experience.

Above all, they provide for a personalized training pathway, a connection between what the student does at school and what they are supposed to learn in the workplace, followed by an assessment of the skills acquired.

It is a sensible framework.

The problem is that my experience as a host company has often been different.

Students arrive without us perceiving a real operational program built around them.

So it falls to us to ask:

what do we have them do?

Who can supervise them?

Which member of the team can we pull away from their own work?

What activity can we invent that has at least some educational value?

If we have the time and people available, we try to build a useful experience ourselves.

If we don't, what happens?

I am not claiming that every PCTO program in Italy works this way.

I can describe what I see.

And that is enough to make me ask a question:

does the connection between school and business really exist in practice, or too often mainly on paper?

The issue becomes even more urgent as the market changes.

The 4+2 technological-professional pathway and guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence in schools have been introduced.

So it would be inaccurate to claim that institutions have done nothing.

My concern is different:

are we changing fast enough?

Because the market does not wait for reform timetables.

And artificial intelligence will not wait for the school system to get comfortable.

Maybe it isn't even true that school lasts too long

This is one of my own beliefs that I try to test.

For years I thought: young people spend too long in education.

Early childhood.

Primary school.

Secondary school.

University.

They enter the labor market very late.

But perhaps the better question is not simply how long school lasts.

It is:

what do we do with all those years?

If we ask someone to invest an enormous part of their youth in education, we need to give them back something more than a qualification.

The ability to understand the world.

The ability to adapt.

The ability to work.

The ability to learn again when what they know is no longer useful.

The ability to live with other people.

The ability to think.

And preferably some real practical experience.

Theory in the morning.

Workshops.

Sports.

Experiences.

Contact with businesses and professionals.

Time to put what they learn into practice.

Perhaps even eating lunch at school instead of carrying kilos of books on their backs to go home and continue studying what they could have experienced together.

So foreign students can never be a problem?

Of course they can.

But every problem needs to be called by its own name.

A child who does not know Italian needs language support.

A classroom with many children who do not know Italian may need more resources.

A family that chooses to live permanently in Italy should have the language skills needed to communicate with schools and institutions.

The concentration of economic and social disadvantage in some schools is a problem.

School segregation is a problem.

And I do not consider it absurd to discuss tools designed to avoid concentrating too many educational difficulties in the same classroom.

But precisely because these problems are real, we need to define them properly.

Otherwise we risk choosing the criterion that is easiest to communicate rather than the one that is most useful for teaching.

A school is not a classroom made of passports.

It is a system made of children, teachers, families, buildings, curricula, services, vulnerabilities, skills and the future.

If we reduce its crisis to the percentage of foreign students, we risk staring at the easiest problem to tell while the harder ones remain exactly where they were.

The child in the corner: what I would tell my son

If my son asked what I think about the proposal announced by the Government, in the end I would probably tell him about 1992.

About my yellow folder.

The banana.

That child who stayed outside during birthday celebrations.

I would tell him about his classmates who arrived without knowing Italian and the teachers who helped them.

About the child who risked missing an activity because his family could not pay for it.

About the bus he takes to play sports because his school cannot use its own building.

I would tell him that problems connected to immigration exist.

That integration also brings responsibilities for those who arrive.

That a society has the right to set common rules.

That pretending every difficulty connected to immigration is invented would be just as superficial as blaming foreigners for problems that come from somewhere else entirely.

Then I would probably ask him a question.

“When you're at school with your classmates, do you think about which ones are Italian and which ones are foreign?”

I can already picture his face.

The face children make when an adult has just asked a question that does not make much sense to them.

And that is the face I would like us to preserve.

Not by building a school that pretends differences do not exist.

By building one strong enough to manage them.

A school capable of teaching Italian to those who do not know it.

Of helping those with other difficulties, regardless of citizenship.

Of demanding respect for the rules.

Of not leaving poor children behind.

Of giving teachers the conditions they need to teach.

Of allowing parents to work without constantly having to choose between their children and their profession.

Of understanding a young person's aptitudes.

Of genuinely communicating with the world of work.

Of preparing them for jobs that exist and jobs that do not exist yet.

Of teaching them to use artificial intelligence without giving up the use of their own.

And, preferably, of having buildings and spaces where they can learn, play sports and live.

Because in the end, when I think about my children's future, the question that interests me is not how many foreign students there will be in their classroom.

It is much harder than that.

When they leave that classroom, what kind of people will we have helped build?