Table of contents
Every year, Italian institutions talk about inclusive schooling as an achievement, and the numbers seem to confirm this narrative: in the 2023-2024 school year, there were 359,000 students with disabilities, 4.5% of the total, with an increase of 75,000 (+26%) in five years. This data could tell a positive story of greater visibility, early diagnosis and growing awareness, but if we look beyond the surface, what emerges is a system that is growing in numbers without improving the quality of the service it offers.
The problem is not how many students with disabilities enter the school system, but what happens once they are inside: 57% of them change support teachers every year, and 8.4% change them even during the same school year. Translated into human terms, more than one in two students lose educational continuity every twelve months, do not build a stable relationship with a reference adult, and cannot count on someone who really knows their way of learning, their difficulties, and their progress.
For families, this is the first thing that emerges: the fatigue of having to start over every September, of having to explain everything again, of seeing their child forced to adapt to a new person, with a new method, with new expectations. And this is not a minor organisational problem; it is at the heart of the failure of a system that defines itself as inclusive but which, in reality, fragments more than it supports.
Fragmentation is not random, it is structural
The discontinuity of support teachers is not bad luck; it is the direct consequence of political and organisational choices that no one seems willing to truly address.
First problem: training Despite attempts to increase specialisation courses — such as the TFA sostegno X cycle confirmed for 2025 and the INDIRE decrees to accelerate the training of experienced teachers — there remains a significant proportion of teachers without specific training, especially in the North. The point is not that there is a lack of courses, but that the system continues to allow support teaching without adequate preparation, and when a teacher is not trained, it is not only they who pay the consequences, but also the students entrusted to them.
Second problem: territorial differences In the South, an average of over 3 hours more support per week is allocated than in the North, but this data should be viewed in context: it is not a sign of greater generosity on the part of the system, but of the fact that families in the South are forced to resort more often to administrative justice to obtain what they are entitled to by law. 5.4% of families in the South have to appeal to the Regional Administrative Court (TAR) to have the necessary hours recognised, compared to 3% of families in the North. This means that, even when more hours are allocated on paper, they are clearly not enough to cover actual needs, and families have to fight to bridge the gap. This is not inclusion; it is a system that forces those who already have fewer resources to expend energy and time to defend rights that should be guaranteed.
I am tired of seeing that the right to education depends on your postcode and your family’s ability to become their own advocate. This is not a technical issue, it is a matter of dignity.
Third problem: physical accessibility Only 41% of school buildings in Italy are accessible to students with physical disabilities (44% in the north, 37% in the south), with peaks of excellence such as Valle d’Aosta (76%) and critical situations such as Liguria and Campania (30%). We are talking about architectural barriers, not matters of interpretation: either a school is accessible or it is not, and the fact that 60% of Italian schools will not be accessible by 2025 tells us that for decades no one has considered it a priority to invest in this area. And this, in a country that ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009, is not a delay, it is a political choice.
From university to work, where the bridge is missing, talent is lost
If school fragments, university often isolates, and the labour market excludes. The result is clear for all to see: only 32.5% of people with disabilities aged between 15 and 64 are employed, compared to the national average of 58.9%, while in the 45-64 age group, 62.2% are inactive or looking for work. According to Eurostat and the International Labour Organisation, in 2025 the employment gap for people with disabilities in Europe exceeded the gender gap by 15 percentage points, and Italy, with a gap of 25%, is among the worst countries.
In the academic year 2024-2025, the number of university students with disabilities increased: the University of Turin went from 969 to 1,230 students (+27%) in four years, and the Ministry of University and Research allocated €2 million (+25%) to support students with disabilities who require intensive assistance, with a unit amount of €10,000 per year per beneficiary. This is a step forward, but it concerns a very small group of students and does not solve the real problem: what happens after graduation?
The answer is simple: too often, nothing. University placement services for students with disabilities are rare, almost always experimental, and have little connection with companies. There are exceptions — such as the Specialised Placement Service at the Federico II University of Naples or the £12 million invested by the Emilia-Romagna Region in 2024 for school-to-work transition programmes — but these are just that, exceptions, not the rule, and where there is no rule, there is chance or luck.
The problem is that the system continues to view students with disabilities as people who need assistance, not as people who can build something. No one talks to them about entrepreneurship, self-employment, digital skills, or careers that can be planned differently. The only narrative they hear is: ‘sign up for targeted job placement and wait’. Wait for what? A system that produces a few thousand placements a year out of hundreds of thousands of registrants? A labour market that sees disability as a problem to be compensated for with incentives, not as a resource to be valued?
I am well aware that a large proportion of people with disabilities can generate direct economic value if given the right conditions: work, business, their own projects, solutions born from the concrete experience of living every day with barriers and adaptations. Not for rhetoric’s sake, but because it works. The problem is not a lack of talent, it is a system that invests more in the narrative of inclusion than in the material conditions to make it possible.
If you don’t measure, you don’t improve. If you don’t tell, you don’t exist.
The Italian school system continues to talk about inclusion without reporting results: there is no public, accessible data showing how many students with disabilities have educational continuity, which provinces work best, which universities have activated placement services, or how many graduates with disabilities find work within a year of graduation. There are no shared indicators, no transparent regional comparisons, and no monitoring system that allows families to make an informed choice about where to enrol their children.
The legitimate feeling is that the system prefers to report on the numerical growth of students with disabilities rather than address the quality of the service they receive, but numbers without context are just institutional marketing, not public policy.
As vice-president of LADI, I am not asking for slogans: I ask that we stop calling what is, in fact, fragmentation masked by ‘good intentions’ ‘inclusion’. I ask for compulsory educational continuity with clear consequences for those who do not guarantee it. I ask for certified specialist training for all support teachers without territorial exceptions. I ask that every university activate a structural placement service for students with disabilities with public and comparable results. And I ask that the school and university system stop preparing people with disabilities for dependence and start preparing them to build independent career paths, including entrepreneurship.
A school that cannot guarantee continuity for more than a year is not being inclusive, it is leaving people behind, and a country that leaves hundreds of thousands of young people behind every year is not inclusive, it is inefficient. That is why we will continue to bring these figures to the attention of institutions, to build networks among entrepreneurs with disabilities, to demand that the system change, not for the sake of rhetoric but because inclusion is not a narrative, it is a concrete result. And until the numbers change, the rest is just words. (photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash).
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ©