Context Matters: Inequality and Educational Strategies in Schools with High Percentages of Non-Italian Students

The presence of students with non-Italian nationality is a topic of increasing interest for the Italian school system. From classrooms with integration challenges to the legislative attempts to stem the phenomenon, this issue is often considered in a way that is detached from the territorial context, often ending up being treated exclusively as an organizational problem.

In recent years, INDIRE has implemented the structuring of a contextual database of the Italian school. This tool (named "Le scuole di INDIRE") contains, in addition to the technical data of individual schools, also the contextual data of the territories where the schools are located, at the level of a single territorial unit. Data on the projects that the school implements are also present. Through the reading of these data, we will study the relationship between inequality and territorial context: how the context influences both individual pupils and institutions and how the school reacts; what strategies it implements and what tools are used.

The schools with the highest percentage of presence of pupils with non-Italian nationality (well over the norm that speaks of 30% of foreigners per class, strongly disregarded - Circolare Ministeriale No. 2, 8/01/2010) were selected at the national level.

The territorial contexts of these schools, the relationship between the school and the pupil of non-Italian nationality, and the characteristics of the school project with reference to the specific migration issue were analyzed. In addition to data analysis, case studies of particularly significant schools were selected, both from the point of view of best practices and from the point of view of territorial complexity.