Italian schools struggle to make migrant pupils feel at home

At the Iqbal Masih comprehensive school in Pioltello — a working-class Milan suburb with many foreign residents, six new North African pupils recently watched a video of the hit song “Casa Mia” (My House) by Italian rap star Ghali, whose own parents were Tunisian migrants.  

Afterwards, instructor Alice Marcandalli — trained to teach Italian to non-native speakers — used the lyrics to discuss vocabulary linked to home: from verbs like eat, sleep, play and wash to ideas like hospitality, security and tranquility.

All new migrant pupils at this school get 4.5 hours of weekly intensive Italian instruction for at least a year so they don’t flounder in class and can communicate with teachers and peers.

“This is the base for integration — it’s the first step,” said Marcandalli. “This is not a vacation for them . . . Italian is fundamental for them to understand the country where they are growing up.”

Yet few of the nearly 900,000 foreign pupils enrolled in the country’s school system are lucky enough to get such support. Italian law guarantees every child’s right to attend school regardless of legal status, but Rome has no protocols and limited resources to facilitate their academic success.

Around 10.6 per cent of Italy’s 8.2mn school children are foreigners; of those, two-thirds are the Italian-born children of resident foreign workers. In Milan and other heavily industrialised northern provinces, foreign pupils make up 20 to 30 per cent of primary school enrolment. 

But teachers are largely left to their own devices to cope, often with dismal results. “There are schools that are doing a good job with respect to foreigners and others that are not,” said Gabriele Ballarino, a sociologist at the University of Milan. “It just depends on the skills and motivation of the principal and teachers.”

Typically, new arrivals to Italy receive just 20 to 30 hours of specialised Italian instruction. Italian-born foreign pupils get no remedial help at all, even though their language skills usually lag behind their citizen peers and they fare poorly on standardised tests in all subjects. More than 30 per cent of immigrant pupils drop out of school compared with just 9.8 per cent of Italians — costly failures for a rapidly ageing society with an acute skilled worker shortage.

“Italy doesn’t have many young people, so every single dropout is a big problem,” said demographer Francesco Billari, rector of Milan’s Bocconi University. “It’s a waste of what you call human capital.” 

In a bid to improve the picture, education minister Giuseppe Valditara has suggested that immigrant students attend transition classes until they master Italian. But opposition politicians and other critics say that would create educational ghettos.

Even for the most committed schools, working with migrant-origin children can be a political minefield in a polarised society chafing against its increasing ethnic diversity.

At the Pioltello school, of the roughly 1,300 pupils aged three to 14, around 45 per cent are foreign nationals — mainly of north African origin — while another 150 are recently naturalised, mostly not speaking Italian at home.

Headteacher Alessandro Fanfoni has worked to create a supportive environment for them with strong backing from a Milan-based children’s charity, Aleimar, which helped pay Marcandalli’s salary and provided a part-time cultural and linguistic mediator to improve communication with migrant parents. 

But when Pioltello teachers decided to close the school on Eid in April to avoid high absenteeism on a festival celebrated by more than half the pupils, they found themselves at the centre of a national firestorm, slammed by far-right politicians for fuelling the “Islamisisation of Italy”.

Deputy head Maria Rendani defended the Eid closure as a “civilised choice” and said successful integration of foreign children also requires respectful recognition of their cultural origins.

“These children have two cultures — they are growing up and studying in Italy,” she said. “But being part of the country where they live cannot be done by denying the cultures of the countries from which they come.”

amy.kazmin@ft.com