“By now everyone is DSA!”
“Back in our day, all these DSAs didn’t exist!”.
“The slightest difficulty and it’s immediately DSA!”
If you work in a school, these are conversations you hear sooner or later. Indeed, every now and then I glance at the class list, see how many PDP there are (Personalized Didactic Plans), and think: could they have become so many?
Well, one thing is true: certifications have risen quite a bit.
In the 2010/2011 school year, students with a DSA certification were around 0.9%. In 2022/2023, according to the latest national data published by the Ministry of Education and Merit, they reached 6%: more than 350,000 boys and girls from third grade onward.
So the question makes sense: what is happening?
The first thing to remember is that in 2010 Law 170 arrived, the one that finally recognized dyslexia, dysgraphia, dysorthography and dyscalculia (forms of neurodivergence that in school are grouped under the acronym DSA) and gave schools tools to intervene.
Before, many of those students had another diagnosis, much quicker and less scientific: unmotivated, distracted, lazy. And behind every difficulty there was a single cause: “They could do more.”
Over the years we have learned to better recognize what lies beneath. And indeed, one of the largest studies conducted in Italy on dyslexia, published in 2019 and carried out on nearly ten thousand children between eight and ten years old, found something quite striking: almost two out of three children with dyslexia had never been diagnosed before.
There’s another curious data point. In 2022/2023, students with DSA were 7.9% in the Northwest and 6.7% in the Northeast. In the South and the Islands, only 2.8%. Yet studies on dyslexia prevalence do not show geographical differences in these proportions.
Translated: it’s very hard to believe that almost three times as many DSA cases are born in the North. It is far more likely that access to diagnoses, the services available, the attention of schools, and families’ economic means vary.
The reason we see so many more diagnoses today, in short, is at least partly the same as the reason we see many more stars: the telescopes have improved.
Capito?
They were there, right in front of us, and no one saw them. Not to mention how many of today’s adults who have tried to undergo diagnostic tests can recognize themselves in this story: school was a disaster, years of feeling simply stupid, and perhaps the reason was neurodivergence.
At this point, however, it’s time to ask the most uncomfortable question: could someone today take advantage of all this for personal gain? Could some family seek certification hoping that their child would have fewer assignments, fewer demands, easier questions?
It can happen. It would be naïve to say it’s impossible.
The point is that we do not have data proving the existence of a widespread phenomenon of fake or self-satisfying diagnoses obtained to make school easier. There may be cases, but there is no data that allows us to talk about a widespread phenomenon.
What is still missing, perhaps, is a culture of neurodivergence, unfortunately still today associated by public opinion and even by some professionals with a kind of absolute limit: if you have it, you can only go so far. It is often pathologized, and this leads many to associate it with some sort of excuse from work and from effort. In short: to lower the bar immediately.
No, that is not how it works.
A boy with dyslexia can read War and Peace, perhaps with alternative tempos and approaches. A girl with dyscalculia can study mathematics and understand its concepts. A boy with dysgraphia can have a lot to say, even if to write it he will need different tools.
And so?
We have taken a huge step forward by learning to recognize difficulties that once we dismissed as laziness. Now we must prevent the pendulum from swinging too far: that every effort automatically becomes a disorder, that a diagnosis ends up describing the whole student, and above all that help becomes a reason to expect less from him.
In short: the diagnosis is a starting point, not a pre-determined limit on how far one can go.
Il mio migliore amico è un fantasma
Eppure cadiamo felici
Geografia di un dolore perfetto
Il cuore non va a dormire
Quel posto che chiami casa
THE AUTHOR – Enrico Galiano, a Friulian teacher and writer born in ’77, in the classroom as much as on social media, where he has a large following, knows how to talk to young people.
After the success of novels (all published by Garzanti) such as And Yet We Fall Happily, All the Life You Want, Happy Against the World, and Stronger Than Every Goodbye, he published a special book, Just a Moment to Return to Being Children, illustrated by Sara Di Francescantonio. He then returned to fiction with Sleep Tonight on My Heart, and, still for Garzanti, his first essay, The Art of Making Big Mistakes. With Salani, Galiano published his first youth story, The Secret Society of Saving Words. And Garzanti released, again, his second essay, School of Happiness for Eternal Repeats.
After the novel Geography of a Perfect Pain, he returned to bookstores with A Life Isn’t Enough, and then published, still with Salani, the second book for teens, The Incredible Adventure of a Super Mistake. With Garzanti in 2025 his novel That Place You Call Home came out, and with Einaudi Stile Libero, in 2026, The Heart Doesn’t Sleep.
His new book is My Best Friend Is a Ghost (Salani).
Here you can read all the articles written by Galiano for our site, with whom he has been collaborating regularly for several years (also with videos for Instagram and TikTok).
