For centuries, the infant school in Champorcher, in the Aosta Valley, has been an integral component of the community, with the sound of children’s voices in the playground providing a beacon of hope for the mountain village’s survival.
In September last year, however, the school fell eerily silent. It was forced to close after just two pupils enrolled.
“When a school closes, a village dies,” said Stefania Girodo Grant, the headteacher of a cluster of schools including those in Champorcher. “Because the future of a village depends on births.”
Empty cots in maternity units had already become the haunting symbol of Italy’s dramatically declining birthrate. The number of births reached a historic low of 393,000 in 2022. Now classrooms are emptying across the country as the demographic crisis moves up the age brackets.
According to data from Tuttoscuola, a news outlet that specialises in education, Italy’s infant schools lost 456,408 enrolments – equal to almost 30% of pupils – over the last decade. And if the fall in the birthrate continues at the current annual pace, government figures forecast 1.4 million fewer students aged between three and 18 by 2034, and the closure of many schools.
“Italian schools are vanishing like the melting glaciers,” said Giovanni Vinciguerra, the director of Tuttoscuola. “Water is the source of life and schools are essential for society. The figures really are striking. This phenomenon started with the infant schools, and inevitably it will spread to primary and secondary schools.”
The number of newborns in Italy has been in steady decline since the 2008 financial crisis, with the average number of children for each woman standing at 1.24 as of 2020 – among the lowest fertility rates in the EU. At the same time, the population is rapidly ageing – the number of centenarians in Italy has tripled over the last 20 years to 22,000 – placing even more pressure on government finances.
Several factors have contributed to the birthrate decline, including the struggle among young people to find stable jobs and, for those that do, a chronically insufficient childcare support system. Many women who become pregnant are forced to resign as they are unable to juggle work with family life, and then later struggle to re-enter the workplace. Some even get sacked when they fall pregnant. Others are simply choosing not to have children.
A major factor, however, is the decline in the number of women of reproductive age.
“The economic issues and lack of welfare support influences the birthrate, but a long-term trend is that there are fewer women to have children,” said Giorgia Serughetti, a sociologist at the University of Milan-Bicocca. “The model of parenthood has also changed. Care standards have gone up and so there is a big focus on the investment needed to raise a child, and also fear of exposing your child to an uncertain future.”
Successive governments over the last decade have offered various financial incentives to encourage people to start a family, the most recent being a scheme introduced by the government of the former prime minister Mario Draghi which provides families with monthly payments of between €50 (£44) and €175 for every newborn up until the age of 21.
But all have so far failed to yield results. The prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, said her conservative government was determined to take action to reverse the birthrate trend. “There are more and more people to maintain in Italy and fewer and fewer people who are working,” she said this month.
Although foreigners substantially contribute to Italy’s economy – and to its school population – solving the birthrate issue with immigration is a sore point for Meloni’s government. Francesco Lollobrigida, the agriculture minister and Meloni’s brother-in-law, sparked controversy last week after suggesting Italians were at risk of “ethnic replacement”. “Italians are having fewer children so we’re replacing them with someone else. That’s not the way forward,” he said.
Meloni has argued that the problem can’t just be solved with immigration, “but with the great unused reserve of female labour and by focusing on demographics, with incentives for families to bring children into the world”.
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Her government has also hinted at encouraging people to have children by exempting them from paying income tax.
But Gustavo De Santis, a demographics professor at the University of Florence, said: “Declarations made by the government shouldn’t be taken too seriously because they are, as always, impromptu – something springs to mind and they say it.
“Besides, good policies to support reproduction require a huge amount of money that Italy doesn’t have.”
Meanwhile, as the government grapples for solutions, regional education boards are trying to come up with ways to counter shrinking class sizes, such as combining age groups, and to keep schools open for as long as possible so that communities don’t completely vanish.
In Aosta Valley, a semi-autonomous region, other schools are at risk of succumbing to a similar fate to the one in Champorcher this year, including the infant school in the nearby town of Châtillon.
“In Aosta, it’s not a problem of money, as we can keep an infant school open even if there are only three pupils – such a number would be unthinkable elsewhere in Italy,” said Luciano Emilio Caveri, a regional councillor. “The problem is simply that people are not having babies any more.”
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