Over-representation of foreign students within the group of students with special educational needs

This work is part of a research that seeks to investigate the possible overrepresentation of students with a history of migration within the group of students with "special educational needs" in the Italian education system. With the development of ethnographic research in various schools of a city of Southern Italy, and in contact with school administrations and ministerial regulatory production, we intend to provide some explanations for this apparently disproportionate representation. After presenting a set of statistical data from the international context, we dwell upon the details of general statistical data for Italy. From this, we then move on describing who is the target group of "special education" in the school system of this country, and presenting the speeches of a group of teachers and technical experts, in order to explain the possible underlying causes of this overrepresentation.