Country Digital Education Ecosystems and Governance

A Companion to Digital Education Outlook 2023

Report

13 December 2023

16. Italy

Abstract

This note provides an overview of Italy’s digital education ecosystem, including the digital tools for system and institutional management and digital resources for teaching and learning that are publicly provided to schools and educational stakeholders. The note outlines how public responsibilities for the governance of digital education are divided and examines how Italy supports the equitable and effective access to and use of digital technology and data in education. This includes through practices and policies on procurement, interoperability, data privacy and regulation, and digital competencies. Finally, the note discusses how Italy engages in any initiatives, including with the EdTech sector, to drive innovation and research and development towards an effective digital ecosystem.

Key features

The central government publicly provides several digital solutions for system and institutional management, including a centralised, single sign-on platform that connects to several applications used for different management functions. INDIRE (Istituto Nazionale di Documentazione, Innovazione e Ricerca Educativa), the ministry’s educational research agency, also develops and provides some digital resources to support teaching and learning. However, few of the publicly provided digital solutions and resources are mandatory, and schools have significant autonomy to choose and acquire additional components of their digital infrastructure.
Since 2015, Italy has invested significant resources into the digitalisation of their education system, guided by a comprehensive digital strategy. The country’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, financed by the EU, will further supplement digitalisation efforts over the coming years.
Due to the somewhat decentralised and highly devolved nature of governance, ensuring the equity of access and use of digital infrastructure and solutions in schools is a challenge. However, the public provision of several digital solutions as well as the provision of a centralised procurement platform with authorised providers may help to provide at least a homogenous access to the main components of a digital education infrastructure – even if gaps may remain in practice.
Significant attention has been devoted to supporting educators to use digital technologies in their classrooms through a multitude of initiatives, including developing practical guidelines, creating networks of teacher champions, increasing opportunities for professional development and, more recently, mandating in-service training on digital education. Several curriculum-based projects have also promoted the development of students' digital skills.
Italy has general rules on data protection and privacy, as well as rules that govern the access to and use of educational data. Statistical data collected by the ministry are also publicly accessible via an open data portal.
The Agency for Digital Italy specifies rules and guidelines on the use of specific technical standards for all technologies developed by the government, and the ministry has recently launched a project to create a certified, interoperable system in which data between different local (private) and central (public) digital solutions can be shared easily and securely.

General policy context

Division of responsibility

In Italy, the governance of the education system is shared between government authorities at central and lower levels (regional offices). The central Ministry of Education and Merit (Ministero dell'Istruzione e del Merito) defines the general rules and fundamental principles of the education system that the regional offices must respect, and it determines the essential conditions that must be guaranteed throughout the country (e.g. institutional funding, teacher salaries). While the central and regional authorities share responsibility for primary and secondary education, regional authorities exclusively govern vocational education and training (VET). However, at all levels of education, schools have significant pedagogical, organisational and research autonomy.

Public responsibilities for providing access to and use of digital technologies in education follow this shared governance model, with some of the digital education infrastructure provided centrally and some provided at the regional or municipal levels. Given the high degree of school autonomy, significant portions are also acquired independently by schools – although private providers must be added to the central procurement platform provided by the ministry (and therefore approved by the government) before schools are able to purchase solutions from them. Among the digital solutions and resources provided by government authorities, only a minority are mandatory for schools and/or teachers to use.

Digital education strategy

The “National Digital School Plan” (Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale; hereafter referred to as the Digital Plan), introduced as part of a 2015 educational reform, is the main strategic and operational document focused on the digital transformation of Italian schools.1 The Digital Plan was adopted in 2016 and sets out several actions grouped into 4 key activity areas: (1) ensuring connectivity; (2) providing innovative learning environments with digital tools and technologies; (3) enhancing students’ digital skills and developing quality content for digital teaching; and (4) providing professional training and development on digital education. Since its implementation, an estimated EUR 1.9 billion has been invested in digitalisation efforts (with a significant proportion derived from European Union funding). A new version of the Digital Plan is being developed and will reportedly focus on systematising the use of new technologies in teaching.

The Digital Plan has improved access to hardware infrastructure in schools across the country. The National Ultrabroadband Plan – led by the Ministry for Economic Development (and Action 1 of the Digital Plan) – aims to ensure that all schools have access to high-speed broadband by 2023.2 The ratio of digital devices to students in the country also halved since 2013, from 1:8 to 1:4 in 2020, and additional funding was made available to schools to purchase digital devices to loan to students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond increased access to devices, over 14 000 “innovative learning environments” (e.g. classrooms augmented with technology, mobile laboratories and digital workspaces) have also been created through the Digital Plan. The country’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza; hereafter referred to as the Recovery and Resilience Plan), financed by the European Union, will supplement this effort with EUR 2 billion to create 100 000 innovative classrooms by 2025.3

The more recent "Digital School 2022-2026" programme – another component of the Recovery and Resilience Plan – consists of four initiatives: (1) migrating the services and applications of educational institutions to qualified cloud solutions; (2) improving the usability of digital services offered by schools through adaptation to a standard model; (3) accelerating the adoption of a centralised platform for accessing digital services and making payments to public administrations; and (4) promoting the adoption of single sign-on systems to facilitate access to digital services provided by the government.4

In terms of broader digital strategy, the national “Digital Administration Code”, managed by the Agency for Digital Italy (Agenzia per l’Italia digitale), provides a binding framework for the digitalisation of the whole of government. Accordingly, the ministry has established a Digital Transition Manager who is responsible for the reorganisation and digitalisation of the ministry and educational institutions in the country.5

The public digital education infrastructure

In Italy, the central and regional governments share responsibility for providing the public digital education infrastructure. Given the significant autonomy of schools, institutions are also able to acquire their own digital solutions and (mostly) choose which of those to use that are publicly provided. This section reviews two aspects of the public digital infrastructure: digital solutions for system and school management, and digital learning resources for teaching and learning.

Digital ecosystem for system and school management

Student information system and school information system

Schools at all education levels are obliged to share certain student data with the ministry (e.g. demographic data, number of students per class, student grades) via the Sistema Informativo Dell’Istruzione (SIDI). The SIDI platform enables school principals and administrative staff, as well as government offices, to use various applications needed for acquiring, verifying and managing the data collected and processed by the ministry (e.g. operational data on schools, student data, financial and accounting data), and thus it essentially functions as a student information system (SIS).6 Student data inputted by each school are stored in a national student register where all students in the system have a unique and longitudinal identifier. Annual surveys are also carried out in all schools by INVALSI (the education agency in charge of evaluation and assessment), and that data is collected through the SIDI platform and integrated with the national student register data. Together, these datasets enable the ministry to monitor the education system and to define school policies.

These data are also aggregated at the school level and made publicly available via a data portal and the Scuola in Chiaro website.7 The data portal provides a wealth of (comparative) aggregate data about students, schools, school staff and the national evaluation system; it enables individuals to freely explore the data and conduct their own analyses, as well as display data in an analytical dashboard. The Scuola in Chiaro website rather functions like a publicly accessible school information system, where individuals can search for information about specific schools and vocational institutes.

Admission and administrative management systems

Since 2014, the ministry provides a centralised student admission management system called Iscrizioni Online.8 Online enrolment is compulsory for all first-year students in state schools at primary and secondary levels (whereas it is optional for private schools). For vocational institutes, only some regions have adopted the same online registration process. In order to use the service, parents must use their single sign-on (SSO) credentials associated with one of the country’s national digital identity systems (e.g. the Public Digital Identity System or the Digital Identity Card) that provides citizens with secure access to public digital services. Parents can refer to the Scuola in Chiaro website to find information about schools they are interested in as well as to identify the schools’ code (required to complete an admission application).

At the central level, the ministry also uses and provides schools with some administrative function systems. For example, Monitor440 (accessible via the SIDI platform) supports both government offices and educational institutions with the planning, management, and monitoring of funding from the government.9 For the management of school staff, the POLIS Online Instances platform is used by government offices and educators for a range of functions including processing applications for vacancies and transfers, registering staff in the ranking system, and collecting data about teachers’ professional development and activities.10 Regional governments also share responsibilities for administrative and management processes, some of which may be carried out using locally-acquired digital solutions.

Learning management systems

The ministry does not provide a centralised learning management system (LMS) for schools to use, but they may authorise solutions licensed from commercial providers that schools can independently acquire. Ministry officials estimate that the majority of schools at all education levels in the country do use an LMS (which often includes a customer relationship management system, a learning content repository, and an analytics dashboard). These learning management systems are also sometimes used for administrative management functions, i.e. as a student register at the institutional level. Indeed, as part of the Digital Plan, the ministry prioritised equipping all primary school classrooms in the country with a digital school register. The ministry provided funding for schools to choose and acquire their own solutions for this function rather than publicly providing one. As of 2020, 96.5% of primary schools had an electronic student register.11

Self-evaluation and institutional management systems

INVALSI (the education agency in charge of evaluation and assessment), in collaboration with the ministry and INDIRE (the education agency in charge of educational research and innovation), provides schools with three key tools to facilitate self-evaluation, improvement and institutional planning. All educational institutions must define a three-year plan that describes their curricular and extracurricular offerings, as well as their organisational planning over that period. The PTOF platform (accessed via the SIDI portal) provides schools with a digitised common reference template that they can customise to create their three-year plan.12 The platform also integrates a self-improvement plan that schools are expected to define following a self-evaluation exercise.13 The Rapporto di Autovalutazione (“Self-Assessment Report”) platform is used to conduct these self-evaluation exercises and functions similarly to the PTOF platform by providing schools with a customisable self-assessment template.14 Schools can directly publish their three-year plans and self-assessment reports on the Scuola in Chiaro website.

Examinations, digital student profile and career guidance

Some parts of the high-stakes end-of-year examinations for upper secondary and VET education are conducted online. To facilitate the management of the examinations process, the ministry has developed the Commissione Web application for secondary education examinations and the Gestione Esami ITS application for state examinations in VET.15 As for the low-stakes annual assessments managed by INVALSI for the monitoring of learning outcomes for all education levels, these have been conducted online since the 2017/18 school year.

To better document students’ experiences in school (e.g. their study paths, examinations), one action of the Digital Plan focused on creating a digital student profile.16 All students in secondary school are now equipped with a student card, “IoStudio” (“I study”), that they can use to register their digital profile. The profile provides students with additional services, for example the possibility to apply for merit-based or means-based funding and opportunities to certify their skills (acquired both during and outside of school). A similar initiative has been carried out to equip teachers with a digital teacher profile, where both their teacher file (career path, responsibilities) and professional development activities can be documented.17

To help students make decisions about their schooling and future careers, the ministry offers the careers guidance website Orientarsi, targeted at students in upper secondary and VET education.18 The website provides information on different educational paths for upper secondary, vocational, and tertiary education, as well as links to other useful information resources and websites. The Ministry of University and Research has a similar website, UniversItaly, targeted at students in or interested in higher education.19

Digital ecosystem for teaching and learning

Teaching and learning resources in formal education

In Italy, schools choose and buy their own resources for learning – with the exception of primary education, where the ministry funds the purchase of textbooks via local offices. Many publishers provide digital content as a standard accompaniment to their textbooks, meaning that schools at all educational levels have access to some form of static digital learning resources, and ministry officials estimate that schools regularly use static (and to a lesser extent interactive) digital learning resources. Officials also estimate that most classrooms are equipped with digital tools or learning supports for students with special educational needs (e.g. assistive technologies). While the ministry ensures that each school has a dedicated teacher for students with special educational needs, as well as specific funding, it is at the discretion of schools whether and how to use their budget to purchase such digital supports.

One specific action of the Digital Plan managed by INDIRE is the “Innovative school libraries” (Biblioteche scolastiche innovative) project. The project aimed to create digital libraries for schools across the country that they could integrate with their own IT services and use to promote broader information literacy skills (as well as loan out digital texts to students).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual classroom environments were used significantly by schools across the country. A survey on a representative sample of schools found that nearly 80% of schools had acquired some sort of virtual classroom environment; however, it is unclear to what extent such solutions continue to be used in schools.20 The INDIRE website and social media channels were also particularly visited during the pandemic as the agency heavily focused on providing information and support to teachers for remote learning.

Finally, both INDIRE and INVALSI produce and/or publicly provide some digital resources for teaching and learning in schools. For example, INDIRE have developed the EdMondo virtual world environment that is only available to teachers and students in formal education, and INVALSI provides digitised versions of previous national tests that teachers can use to support formative assessment.21

Open educational resources to support teachers

The government also supports the development of digital resources for teaching and learning outside the context of formal education. For each research project managed by INDIRE, it collects and provides open educational resources targeted at all education levels. While these resources are not stored in a single repository, they are organised by thematic or curriculum area on the INDIRE website. For example, the Scuola2030 portal contains open resources and research on education inspired by the values and vision of the 2030 Agenda (although some materials are only accessible to teachers using their national digital identity credentials).22 The majority of INDIRE projects focus on specific methodologies and/or core subjects and skills, particularly STEM subjects, but there are also some cross-disciplinary areas of focus (e.g. citizenship). INDIRE also provides information about different pedagogical practices, research and some educational content for learners through its social media channels.23

The ministry also partners with RAI Scuola, the TV education branch of the national broadcaster, to produce freely accessible educational videos on a range of topic areas for students in primary and secondary school.24 In the past, materials produced by the channel were limited to specific topics but since the COVID-19 pandemic its content is organised in a way that reflects standard school subjects. While most of the content is produced for online viewing, some is broadcast directly on the RAI Scuola TV channel. RAI Scuola also produces educational content targeted at university students and adult learners, as well as content for educators themselves.

In addition to the above, ministry officials describe an active community of teachers in the country who engage in producing and sharing their own open educational resources. However, this occurs on a more ad hoc basis and is not formally incentivised or organised by the ministry or its agencies.

Access, use and governance of digital technologies and data in education

Providing some kind of public digital education infrastructure does not necessarily imply that stakeholders will use it. Different rules and policies can therefore ensure access to digital technologies in education, as well as support and govern their use.

Ensuring access and supporting use

Equity of access

Italy does not have specific rules to ensure the equity of access to its digital education infrastructure. The government does publicly provide several digital solutions for system and institutional management as well as some for teaching and learning, in principle ensuring equitable access to components of the digital education ecosystem in a homogenous way across education levels. However, few are mandatory for schools to use – therefore potentially resulting in gaps in their use in practice.

Schools can use non-earmarked, operational funding (no means-based formula) provided by the government via regions and municipalities for expenditure related to ICT, and other operational funding (i.e. grants) may also be obtained through specific projects or local organisations. In general, schools can use these funds to acquire additional components of their digital infrastructure at their discretion, which again may lead to possible disparities and inequities in digital infrastructure access and use across institutions. However, one way that the ministry facilitates schools’ access to additional digital solutions is through a centralised procurement application called Protocolli In Rete. The application is accessible via the SIDI platform and enables schools to browse among and choose private solutions approved by the ministry, as well as apply for ministry funding for specific projects detailed in the Digital Plan. Private providers use the same application to obtain ministry approval and make available their goods and services to schools.

The ministry also addresses equity through some targeted actions. For example, one initiative of the Digital Plan identifies “at risk” schools (on the basis of dropout rates and indicators of learning deprivation) and provides them with an economic subsidy of up to EUR 35 000 to create digital learning environments.25

Supporting the use of digital solutions

Two of the four central pillars of the Digital Plan focus on supporting stakeholders to use digital technologies in schools. For example, Action 23 produced guidelines for teachers on the use and production of open educational resources.26 The guidelines classify different types of digital resources, provide a schema to map their content to the curricula, and advise on best practices for managing shared resources. Additional guidelines focus on helping educators to evaluate, choose and use resources effectively, and to create and validate the quality of their own resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the ministry also published rules and guidelines on the use of technology in class.27

Action 28 of the Digital Plan created a network of “digital animators” across the country: every school now includes one teacher who, together with the school management team, has a strategic role in proliferating digital innovation at their school.28 These digital animators have undergone dedicated training on the initiatives promoted through the Digital Plan, and their role is to support its overall vision and implementation “on the ground”. They do so by organising internal trainings, involving the wider school community (e.g. parents, students) in workshops and trainings, and identifying sustainable digital solutions to integrate in their school. Each school is allocated EUR 1 000 for such activities. In a similar vein, the Digital School Award was created to showcase good practices of digital teaching around the country.29 Other components of the Digital Plan focus on providing technical training to wider school staff to help immediately troubleshoot and internally resolve problems with digital technology.30

In addition to providing different practical supports and guidelines, the Digital Plan also mandates the systematic monitoring of digitalisation in schools. The Digital School Observatory (Osservatorio per la Scuola Digitale) monitors the didactic, technological and innovation progress of the school system, and seeks to understand: how schools buy or procure the digital solutions they require; how digital technologies are used in schools to aid teaching and learning; and how to encourage and/or remove obstacles to whole-of-school innovation.31

Cultivating the digital literacy of education stakeholders

Italy has both rules and guidelines about the development of teachers’ digital competencies as part of their pre-service training, for all education levels.32 The ministry also recently introduced rules to mandate in-service training on digital education from the 2023-24 school year.33 The Recovery and Resilience Plan provides EUR 800 million towards supporting the digital teaching skills of 650 000 educators, in part by creating a new integrated platform, Futura, to deliver online training to school staff on topics related to digital teaching and the digital transformation of schools.34 The Futura platform complements the S.O.F.I.A platform that teachers can use to find and access online professional development courses on a range of topics from various (government-approved) providers.35

These tools build on earlier initiatives to support (voluntary) professional learning and development on digital education, including the “Future Labs” initiative. Nearly 30 “Future Labs” – modelled as future classrooms with innovative training environments for robotics, augmented reality and digital fabrication activities – were created across all of the Italian regions to provide educators with experiential training on digital teaching methods.36

Italy also has rules (for primary and lower secondary) and guidelines (for upper secondary and VET education) on the development of students’ digital competencies, which are viewed as part of the cross-curricular set of skills underpinning citizenship.37 Several initiatives of the Digital Plan have translated these rules and guidelines into curriculum frameworks at different educational levels. For example, a new digital civic education syllabus was developed to complement the national curriculum, guiding schools to integrate relevant digital citizenship content and themes into their educational offers.38 Another initiative, the “Programma il Futuro” (“Programme the Future”) project, focused on developing students’ computational thinking skills by integrating 10 hours of programming for students in primary education.39 Over 300 000 students participated in the project in its first year (2014/15), and by 2020, the ministry reported that over 75% of primary schools offered at least 10 hours of computational thinking courses. A third initiative focused on promoting digital entrepreneurship in secondary education; based on a short national curriculum developed centrally, regional governments – in collaboration with local actors (e.g. foundations, universities, companies) – organised entrepreneurship competitions for students. Those with the best projects were given opportunities to participate in “accelerator” workshops and collaborate directly with universities and digital businesses to further develop their ideas.40

Beyond developing new curricula and educational offers, the ministry also created and funded the Digital Careers Plan in collaboration with Italian universities and research centres to promote university offers in innovative STEM sectors and experimental pathways to align students with future digital careers.41

Governance of data and digital technologies in education

In Italy, general rules on data protection and privacy are provided for under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). National rules on data protection and privacy also exist and, while the rules are general, the authority charged with supervising them has a website with dedicated sections on aspects that are relevant to minors and school contexts.42 Schools then write their own data protection and privacy rules based on these national laws. In addition, each school engages an external Data Protection Officer who supports their compliance with data protection and privacy rules. However, accountability over the use of digital technologies in schools. including if used for decision-making purposes, ultimately lies with each school’s principal.

There are also national rules governing the equal access to educational data for public and private research.43 Statistical data collected by the ministry – including data on schools budgets, the national evaluation system, the school building registry, the number of teachers in schools, and aggregated data from the student register – are made freely accessible through the “Single School Data Portal” or the National Statistics Institute (Istituto Nazionale di Statistica).44 Due to the provisions of the general data protection and privacy laws concerning minors, this data can only be communicated to the ministry via each schools’ principal. Digital solutions of private companies used in education are therefore not allowed to use or make available data pertaining to minors.

To facilitate interoperability across digital systems, and particularly that of the SIDI student information system with local solutions used in schools, the ministry launched the “Integrated School Information Systems” (Sistema informativo integrato delle scuole) project.45 The project aims to improve the SIDI infrastructure by creatine an interoperable system in which data between different local (private) and central (public) solutions can be shared easily and securely. More generally, the Agency for Digital Italy has rules and guidelines on the use of open and specific technical standards for technologies developed by the government (though not explicitly in education), and similar guidelines exist about the use of open standards on data collected by the public administration.46

Italy also has rules and guidelines related to data portability in education. Teachers and students can transfer data from their digital teacher and student profiles respectively into the SIDI system.

Supporting innovation, research and development (R&D) in digital education

In Italy, public research objectives are defined through the triennial National Research Plan (Piano Nazionale di Ricerca), to which all public research bodies align their research priorities and agendas. Both INDIRE and INVALSI conduct research on various aspects of digital education (among other areas), but there is no specific education agency or funding programme dedicated to researching digital education nor has the ministry directly commissioned any academic research on the topic within the last five years. INVALSI also co-founded and participates in the FLIP+ e-assessment community, an international forum where interested stakeholders in digital assessments share research, discuss common challenges in computer-based assessment, engage in peer-learning, and co-develop content.47

Both INDIRE and INVALSI directly engage in the development of digital solutions that are then publicly provided to schools for system management or for teaching and learning (e.g. EdMondo, or tools for assessment and self-evaluation).48 The ministry also financially incentivises research and development of EdTech solutions through tax credits or through direct investments in start-up companies. Beyond financial incentives, the Digital Plan created a “Stakeholders Club for the Digital School” to encourage collaboration and to formalise partnerships among the ministry (and its agencies), individual schools and private EdTech companies.49 Partnerships (usually formalised by Memoranda of Understanding) between interested parties are facilitated through the Protocolli in Rete application.

Finally, the ministry has created a secure crowdfunding platform, IDEArium, to facilitate innovation in Italian schools.50 Schools can use the platform to publish project ideas and seek financial support from private individuals or companies via the government’s secure online payment systems.