Empty classrooms: in 10 years Italy will lose 1 million pupils

In a country like Italy, which has been forced to surf the high wave of deficit and public debt for over 30 years, the salient news is often hidden between the folds of budget documents. To realise this, one need only look at the technical report to a government amendment to decree 90/2025 converted into law at the end of July, which was drawn up on the basis of estimates by Inail's actuarial statistical service and validated by the MEF. In quantifying the financial effects of the decision to make insurance coverage structural for approximately 10 million students and teachers, the document outlines the trajectory of what the Italian school will be like ten years from now. Starting with the one million fewer pupils that will attend our classrooms between now and 2034.

The decline will be slow, but inexorable. From 8.84 million students in 2024, we will already drop to 8.67 million in 2025. Making the premise that the account includes both schools of every order and degree, i.e. from infancy to high school, and those enrolled in universities and Afam institutions, it is perhaps appropriate to exclude the latter from the calculation. The forecasts made by Inail and Ragioneria Generale dello Stato technicians consider them to be constant at 1.76 million by convention when various estimates within the academic world foretell the gradual emptying of university lecture halls starting from 2029/30 (38% fewer freshmen in 15 years, ed.).

Even focusing on pupils alone, the numbers are emblematic. Between 2026 and 2030 they will drop by 110,000 per year; between 2031 and 2034 by 100,000. Result: from 6.91 million students in classrooms today we will drop to 5.90 million in 2034. And this is the first time that the school population will fall below the psychological threshold of six million.

The technical report to Decree Law 90 stopped there. But within the government there are already some forecasts circulating that speak, in the absence of a reversal of course, of at least 100 thousand fewer professorships to be considered over a decade and of about 5 thousand school complexes destined, sadly, to be emptied (out of about 40 thousand overall).

A first taste, after the controversy that erupted at the time of the Draghi government, which led to a 'downward' revision of the cuts, will be in September, when the headcount will drop for the first time since the 2020/21 school year (until then it had always increased or at least remained stable, ed.) All in all, we are talking about 3,800 units, if we consider the 5,660 fewer common posts (related to the denatality) and the 1,886 more on support as established by the last budget law. It was foreseen by an inter-ministerial decree Mef-Mim at the end of July, which represented - as we have just seen - an almost absolute novelty. For us, teachers have often been a variable (at least in part) independent of the rest. So much so that we have a pupil/teacher ratio permanently above the OECD average (here there are 14 pupils per teacher at primary school and 13 at middle and high school - here these figures drop to one teacher for every 11 pupils at primary and middle school, and even 10 pupils per teacher at high school).