The COVID-19 pandemic and the related need for children to do a significant amount of their timetable via distance learning has had a major impact on Italian pupils' education, a report said on Thursday.
The report said the damage was especially severe in Italy's high schools, with close to half of the nation's youngsters leaving school this year without the necessary skills.
The 2021 report on the 'Invalsi' tests, which are not used to grade pupils but to to evaluate how schools and the system itself is performing, said 44% of high-school leavers did not have an adequate level in Italian and 51% were not up to scratch in mathematics, in both cases an increase of nine percentage points with respect to before the pandemic in 2019.
Over half of the high-school students in several Italian regions failed to achieve an adequate result in Italian - 64% in Campania and Calabria, Puglia 59%, Sicily 57%, Sardinia 53% and Abruzzo 50%.
In Campania, 73% of high-school leavers were under the minimum threshold in mathematics, while it was 70% for Sicily and 69% for Puglia.
The situation was not quite so bad for the nation's middle schools, with 39% not good enough in Italian (up five points on 2019) and 45% not reaching an adequate level in mathematics (a rise of six points).
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