The Sicilian classes are still emptying: almost 10 thousand fewer students in 2024/2025. But for the moment the government has decided not to overreach the teacher workforce, maintaining the same numbers as the current year. A move to implement the ideas on foreign students expressed in recent days by the Ministers of Education and Transport, Valditara and Salvini? We will see. The fact is that in the face of demographic decline, classes are shrinking and with them the chances of being transferred to the Island from the North or of stabilizing by winning teaching competitions. The support is merciless. Last year, 15,000 submitted a transfer application to return to the island and less than 1,600 received the approval: one in ten. AND for the Pnrr competition, less than 4 places out of a hundred were allocated to Sicily.
For Francesca Bellia, head of the Sicilian Flc CGIL: «The demographic decline, which exists in all Italian regions, is taking on worrying dimensions in Sicily. And even if for next year the ministry has confirmed the same staffing as the current one, this decrease has repercussions on all phases of Sicilian school life. Just think of the size of the school network. Not to say that the limits to class formation remain. So the classes will decrease and everything else will fall. We need, and I also address the regional government, effective policies on family and work to prevent our young people from emigrating and starting a family outside Sicily and to ensure that young couples do not have to do a thousand calculations before giving birth to their children”.
The numbers communicated to the unions by the regional school office say that the collapse of the Sicilian school population is not stopping: the places left empty in the island’s schools from next year due to the lower births of previous years, emigration towards other Italian regions and foreign and the aging population will be 9,500. In ten years, from 2014/2015 to 2024/2025, Sicily has lost over 110,000 students. It’s as if a city like Syracuse had suddenly disappeared. Fewer students which become 184 thousand if we reach the 2004/2005 school year. Twenty years ago. As if Ragusa had also disappeared together with Syracuse. With fewer students, fewer classes will be formed, a fact that adds to the dimensioning of the school network requested a year and a half ago by the first budget law of the Meloni government. In three years, Sicily will have to count on no more than 700 educational institutions. The reason is quite simple. In this way, the salaries of principals and secretarial directors to be paid are reduced. But the number of schools for each autonomous school will increase. And with them the hardship of families.
To calculate the schools of each region, the inter-ministerial decree (Economy and Education) which dealt with this topic had initially hypothesized a divisor equal to 961: as many autonomous schools as there are pupils divided by 961. And if the decline of the last ten years had it not existed, with 110 thousand more pupils Sicily would today have had 115 autonomous educational institutions in addition to those it will have at the end of the three-year reduction of Italian schools. Not a little. From the 2021/2022 school year to the current one, the teaching staff numbers have remained unchanged. But Sicily still lost 275 classes. Because the rules for setting up classes are strict: minimum 15 pupils in primary school and 18 in nursery school.
And again: at least 18 students in the sixth grade and as many as 27 in the first year of high school. Restrictive provisions for the superior also for the intermediate classes, which on average must have 22 students. And if their number drops, regardless of the staff, the classes also drop. A kind of paradox that could have a solution in the latest releases of some government officials. The decline in the Sicilian school population and the redundant teaching positions could in fact be used to implement two ideas which are currently creating quite a bit of controversy at a political level and which risk turning into a boomerang on the eve of the European elections: the cap on foreign students by class desired by the minister Matteo Salvini and the separate classes for first generation immigrant pupils requested by my government colleague Giuseppe Valditara.
Resolutions that would also have repercussions in our area. While in Sicily the number of students decreases overall, foreign students increase. In 2022/2023 we were at 29 thousand, five years earlier there were just over 26 thousand. An 11% growth concentrated above all in some schools in the Trapani and Ragusa areas. And the number of classes is also growing, especially in elementary and middle schools, where the foreign presence exceeds 30%. In primary school, according to data released by the Ministry of Education and Merit, in 2021/2022 there were 343: 2.9%. And 66, one in a hundred, on average. Classes that, according to Salvini, should not exist. Because at most a class should accommodate 20% of non-Italian students. And that Valditara would like to send to separate classes, especially first generation foreigners, to have them study Italian and Mathematics.
