Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's cabinet has adopted a decree law banning burqas and niqabs in schools and capping the number of students with a poor command of Italian per class.
If a child seriously struggles to integrate at school, social services will be called, and the parents will be obliged to attend free Italian lessons.
Failure to comply will be punished with a fine of up to €1,000.
Meloni is grappling with the rise of National Future, a party founded in February by former army general Roberto Vannacci and already polling at around 8 per cent, while surveys show her coalition trailing the centre-left bloc.
National Future has made schools a central battleground in its campaign advocating "remigration" — the deportation of foreigners to their countries of origin — and has argued that Islamic "contamination" in classrooms harms national identity.
The Save the Children charity has said that forcing children to change schools or enrol in a different institution from their peers because of their nationality or limited proficiency in Italian would "create 'first-class' and 'second-class' students"'first-class' and 'second-class' students.
Valditara said there were 34,000 school classes in Italy in which over 30 per cent of the students are foreign.
The 30 per cent limit on the number of foreign students per class was established in a ministerial memorandum in 2010.
Meloni first unveiled the plans on Sunday at a rally of the youth wing of her Brothers of Italy party, where she also said parents of children who do not speak Italian would be needed to attend language courses.