How many failing grades to be held back in high school

It is the question I get most often from a parent, and it usually comes with the electronic register open in front of them: “three failing grades and he’s held back, right?”. The honest answer is that this number exists nowhere in the rules, and believing it does leads to two opposite mistakes: panicking in November over two bad grades, or staying calm until May because “it’s only two subjects”.

What follows is the true picture: what the law says, what the individual school’s regulations say (which is a different thing), and what a class council (the meeting of a class’s teachers) really looks at when it sits down for the end-of-year decision. At the end you’ll find the concrete things to do now, in September, when there is still all the time to change the result.

The short answer: there is no number set by law

No national rule sets a number of failing grades beyond which you are held back. Non-admission to the next year is a decision of the class council, made subject by subject, looking at four things:

• the seriousness of the failing grade (a 5 and a 3 are not the same thing);
• the continuity over time (an isolated 4 in October weighs less than four months of 4s);
• the realistic chances of recovery in the rest of the year or over the summer;
• the student’s participation and overall path.

The most important corollary, and the one parents find out late: in theory even a single failing grade can justify non-admission, if the council considers it unrecoverable and gives reasons for the decision. It rarely happens, but it happens — typically on a subject of the track with a very low grade carried through the whole year.

And the opposite also holds: there are students admitted with three non-serious failing grades, because the council saw an upward curve in the second term.

So where does the “three failing grades” rule come from?

It comes from the school regulations, that is from the PTOF (the school’s three-year plan) of the individual school. The threshold of three serious failing grades (grade ≤ 4) beyond which non-admission becomes very likely is extremely widespread — you find it written or implied in very many schools. In the same way, many schools limit to three the maximum number of subjects with suspended judgement (a failed subject to make up over the summer): beyond that threshold, instead of sending you to September, you are held back.

But these are internal practices, not law. Two practical consequences:

1. Those thresholds change from school to school. The criterion applied in your child’s class is written in the PTOF of their school, not in an article of law that applies to everyone. The PTOF is public and downloadable from the school’s website: reading the section on assessment and admission criteria takes twenty minutes and is the most useful thing you can do today.
2. The written reason in the minutes is compulsory. A non-admission judgement without a specific reason — that is, one that doesn’t say why those shortcomings are unrecoverable in that specific case — is flawed and can be challenged. This is the families’ real procedural safety net, much more than counting grades.

The two numerical rules that do really exist

Here the numbers exist, and they are binding.

Conduct

With law no. 150 of 1 October 2024, in force since 31 October 2024 and operative from the 2024/25 class councils, in upper secondary school:

• 5 in conduct → non-admission to the next year or to the state exam, even with all the other grades passing;
• 6 in conduct → suspension of judgement until September, with a critical paper on civic education to present and discuss (in Year 5 it is discussed in the oral part of the exam). Paper missing or insufficient → held back;
• the maximum school credit of the band can be awarded only with conduct ≥ 9.

2026/27 is the third round of class councils with these rules: it is no longer a new scheme being run in, it is the mechanism in full operation. If a 6 in conduct arrives in the first term, that is not “a ticking-off”: it is already inside the perimeter of suspension of judgement.

Absences

The school year is valid with at least three quarters of the personalised annual timetable — so a maximum of 25% absences (Presidential Decree 122/2009). Below that threshold the student cannot be assessed and is not admitted, regardless of grades.

The teachers’ board can approve justified exceptions: documented serious health reasons, treatments, pregnancy, certified competitive sport. The exception is not automatic, it has to be requested and documented, and the condition remains that there are enough elements to assess. If your child has a condition that causes recurring absences, the moment to talk to the class coordinator is now, not in May with the count already closed.

The most frequent case is not being held back: it is the failed subject

It is worth keeping the orders of magnitude in mind, because they reduce the fear of September considerably. On the Ministry of Education (MIM) data for the 2025/26 school year (survey at 3 August 2026):

Two readings that matter for a parent. The first: the peak of failed subjects is in Year 2, not in Year 1 — the typical collapse is not the impact with the new school, it is the year when the maths syllabus accelerates (radicals, systems, lines) on foundations that have stayed fragile. The second: more than nine in ten of those sent to September pass the September exam. A failed subject is a serious problem and costly in terms of the summer, but it is almost never the antechamber of being held back.

And the most failed subject, by a wide margin, is maths.

If the failed subject is in maths, the first concrete step is to try the paper for your year and see where the marks are lost: Year 1 maths catch-up, Year 2 (the most frequent), Year 3 and Year 4.

Two concrete cases

Case 1 — Year 1 science high school, December. On the report: 4 in maths, 5 in Latin, 6 in the others. The parents think “two failing grades, we’re far from the threshold”. In reality the important signal is not the count: it is that the 4 in maths comes from work on first-degree equations and factorisation, that is from the tools on which the whole rest of the first two years rests. Left as it is, that 4 doesn’t stay a 4: in Year 2 it becomes a 3 on radicals, because rationalising a denominator needs precisely the factorisations that were never sorted out. Here the right move in January is not “study more”, it is to go back four months and close the specific hole.

Case 2 — Year 4, a single but chronic failing grade. 4 in maths from September to May, everything else between 6 and 7. A single failing grade, so no threshold exceeded. Yet it is the case in which the class council really discusses non-admission, because continuity weighs more than the number: a shortcoming that hasn’t moved in nine months is, in the teachers’ eyes, a structural shortcoming. The most common ending is still the suspension of judgement, with a September test on the whole year’s syllabus — which at that point means a summer of real work.

In both cases the point is the same: the direction counts, not the snapshot. A class council looks at whether the curve is rising. The most effective way to show that it is rising is for it to really rise, and to do that you have to know exactly where the hole is.

How to tell where the hole is, without guessing

Before enrolling your child on any course, you need a diagnosis. The difference between “he’s doing badly in maths” and “he can’t factorise a trinomial and so gets stuck on half the exercises” is the whole difference between a year of generic tutoring and two months of targeted work.

The quickest and free way to get it is to have them do a maths practice test on the topic they are doing in class right now: 15 questions in 50 minutes, no penalty, on the real syllabus for their year. The correct answer to every exercise is free; the guided step-by-step solution unlocks with your first lesson. In an hour you go from “it’s going badly” to a list of three or four topics to work on, which is very useful information even just for talking to the teacher at the meeting.

What to do now, in September

The whole logic of this article says one thing only: the moment when admission is decided is not the class council, it is the months that precede it. In September you have the maximum margin and the minimum cost. An order of priorities that works:

1. Download the PTOF from the school’s website and read the criteria for admission and for suspension of judgement. Ten minutes, and you stop reasoning on invented thresholds.
2. Look at last year’s grades, not this year’s — this year there aren’t any yet. The subjects that closed with a scraped 6 are those that become 5 this year.
3. Arrange the meeting with the coordinator by October, before the first tests. The useful message is not “how is it going?”, it is “what are the gaps from the first two years that you see in class?”.
4. If there is a DSA or BES certification (for learning difficulties or special educational needs), hand it in at once: the PDP (personalised learning plan) is normally built within the first term. I wrote about it in detail in PDP and PEI: the difference and how to ask the school.
5. Don’t turn the fear of being held back into pressure at home. In my experience the worst spirals start there: threats, comparisons with siblings, withdrawal of sport. Sport and friendships are often the only thing keeping motivation upright. If there is an anxiety component, these techniques for test anxiety are a concrete starting point.
6. Step in on the critical subject by November, not in March. Recovering three months of syllabus is a job; recovering eight is a summer.

If non-admission has already arrived

If you are here because being held back has already been decided, two things are worth knowing. The first: you have the right to access the minutes of the class council and read the reasons. The second: an appeal to the TAR (the regional administrative court) must be filed within 60 days of notification — it is a mandatory deadline, you need legal assistance, and there is also the route of the extraordinary appeal to the Head of State, whose conditions and deadlines a lawyer will assess. The grounds that hold up are almost always procedural: defective reasoning, failure to inform the family of the shortcomings in time, errors in conducting the class council. It is not “my child deserved more”: it is “the school didn’t do what it had to do”.

How we work on these cases

When a parent in this situation writes to me, the first lesson is not a lesson: it is half an hour in which I look with the student at last year’s work and the practice test, and work out whether the problem is a specific gap, a missing method, or both together. From there comes a plan with an estimated number of hours, not an open-ended subscription.

Lessons are online, one to one, with a tutor for the subject. For current rates for a single lesson and the 10-hour package see the pricing page. Payment is offline — bank transfer, Satispay, PayPal, card — and you pay nothing for the initial 30-minute introductory call. If you need a starting point on the most at-risk subject, the page on maths tutoring describes how we structure catch-up by year, and if last summer ended with a failed subject there is the dedicated guide on catching up a maths failed subject.

If the student is outside the regular path, there is also the route of the external candidate: I explain it in the post on external candidates at the maturità.

If you want to understand where your child really stands before the first tests arrive, write to me from the contact page: the first half hour is there to tell you whether help is needed and how much, even when the answer is “not for now”.