Italy is set to ban burqas and niqabs in schools, alongside implementing a cap on foreign students per classroom to improve integration, with compulsory Italian lessons for parents of students struggling to adapt.

Italy is set to ban burqas and niqabs in schools, alongside implementing a cap on foreign students per classroom to improve integration, with compulsory Italian lessons for parents of students struggling to adapt.

Italy is set to ban burqas and niqabs in schools, alongside implementing a cap on foreign students per classroom to improve integration, with compulsory Italian lessons for parents of students struggling to adapt.

The Italian government is planning to introduce measures to cap the number of foreign students in individual classrooms, and ban the wearing of burqas and niqabs at school.

The announcement was made by the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni at the Gioventù Nazionale national festival in Rome on Sunday.

Meloni said specifically that the burqa, a full-body covering, and the niqab, a face covering that is worn by Muslim women, would be banned. Regular head coverings do not seem to be a target of the proposed ban.

The burqa and the Niqab ahave already been banned in France. Belgium and Austrian schools. In Austria, starting in September 2026, girls under the age of 14 are prohibited from wearing a headscarf to school that "covers the head in accordance with Islamic tradition." Denmark also has a nationwide ban on the garment, while the Netherlands imposed a partial ban in August 2019 in schools, hospitals, government offices, and public transportation.

Spain and Poland’s constitutions, however, protect freedom of conscience and religion.

In Germany, federal law prohibits public employees, judges, members of the armed forces, and drivers from covering their faces while driving, Euronews reported.

The Italian government is also planning to put a legal cap on the number of foreign students that can be placed in a single classroom. The PM said that it was to ease integration pressures on both students and teachers. The government has not yet specified what that numerical limit would actually be.

In addition to the cap, Meloni said the measure would make Italian-language lessons compulsory for parents of foreign students found to be facing "serious difficulties integrating into the school system."

According to a study by Idos, there are about 930,000 students without Italian citizenship in the country. The number of foreign students has also increased by 16 per cent, while there was a 12.5 per cent decline in native born students.

Out of the 931,000 foreign students, 65.2 per cent were born in Italy.

About half of the foreign students belonged to Romanian, Albanian, Moroccan, Chinese, and Egyptian nationalities, with the rest distributed among dozens of other countries.

In 2010, a circular from then-Minister Gelmini proposed a maximum cap of 30 per cent foreign students. The provision was scrapped due to the geographical location of schools. Some neighbourhoods had higher immigration density.

More than a quarter of the foreign students are in Lombardy (236,000), followed by Emilia-Romagna (112,839), Veneto (94,669), Lazio (80,051), and Piedmont (78,039). The city with the highest number of non-Italian students is Milan, with 79,039, followed by Rome (63,782), Turin (39,465), and Brescia (32,747), according to the latest Initiatives and Studies on Human Mobility report.

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