I've been running PNRR training on AI and inclusive education for a while, and every so often it's useful to sit on the other side of the table: take a course instead of teaching one. It helps me with two things — checking what actually reaches the people who then have to apply these rules in a school, and having a benchmark for the content I prepare myself.
Why a support teacher takes a course "for school leaders"
The course title — school leaders and system administrators — isn't accidental. System administrators are the roles that, under the school leader, keep the organization running: deputy heads, functional area coordinators, digital innovation coordinators, department heads, class coordinators. It's almost always them who have to write the first draft of a policy, answer colleagues' questions, decide whether a given use of AI is acceptable before the School Board even looks at it.
As I wrote here about the PUIA, Italian Ministerial Decree 166/2025 requires every school to include AI training modules in the staff training plan. A course explicitly designed for the people who have to apply these rules, not just receive them, is the most useful vantage point for understanding what will eventually reach teachers too — for better or worse.
What this kind of course really covers
The 8.5 hours focus on three blocks that keep recurring in this type of training:
- Regulatory framework: the European AI Act, risk classification, obligations that start becoming fully applicable in 2026.
- Organizational role: who decides what in a school when an AI tool comes into play — from the internal referent up to the School Board.
- General use cases: cross-cutting examples of AI applied to teaching and administration, without going too deep into any single area.
It's a solid, necessary foundation. A school leader or system administrator who finishes this course knows how to correctly place the terms they hear cited — AI Act, high-risk system, AI referent — and doesn't walk into a meeting on the topic unprepared.
What's missing, and why it matters
What a generic course like this can't do, by construction, is go into the operational detail of every area of a school. It doesn't cover how to write a Student Profile for special educational needs without violating GDPR, doesn't show a real prompt used in class, doesn't tell you what really happens when a teacher pastes a student's individualized education plan into a chatbot without realizing it.
That's not a flaw in the course: it's a structural limit of any training designed for "every school leader in Italy" rather than for a specific context. The regulation gives the framework; the operational detail for special needs, for a technical department, or for the administrative office has to come from someone else — ideally from whoever lives that area every day.
The most useful part of a certificate like this isn't the final stamp: it's that it gives school leaders and system administrators the same baseline language needed to understand, when a teacher comes with a concrete case, whether they're asking something reasonable or surfacing a problem the school hasn't dealt with yet.
What I'm doing with it, in practice
Three concrete things:
- I'm adding it to my staff training plan. It's the simplest documentary evidence to attach when a school has to show it's working on the training obligation under DM 166/2025.
- I'm using it as a benchmark. I compare the content covered against what I bring to my own PNRR courses — where the generic stops and where a real case, a tested prompt, an anonymized individualized education plan example is actually needed.
- I'm flagging the gap to the system administrators I work with. If a school leader already has the regulatory framework but hasn't yet seen a concrete example of AI applied to special education, that's where I can be useful — not by repeating the AI Act, but by showing what happens when that framework meets a real classroom case.
Frequently asked questions
What are "system administrators" in a school?
The roles that support the school leader in organizational and educational management: deputy heads, functional area coordinators, digital innovation coordinators, department heads, class coordinators.
Is AI training for school leaders mandatory?
Ministerial Decree 166/2025 requires AI training modules to be included in the staff training plan for 2026-27. There isn't yet a single national number of hours, but documented training is one of the three concrete obligations required.
Is an 8-hour individual certificate enough for the PUIA?
No, it covers one person's training, not the school's obligation — which requires a plan for all staff. It's still a useful basis to cite as a model.
What's often missing from these generic courses?
Operational detail: specific use cases for special educational needs, GDPR applied to student data, tested prompts and workflows used in class.
Conclusion
An 8.5-hour course doesn't train an expert — that's not its purpose, and no course of this length should claim it is. It trains someone who knows what's being talked about when the word "AI" comes up in a school meeting, and who recognizes when it's time to call in someone who already has the operational detail in hand.
It's the same reason why, in the book "Intelligenza Artificiale per la Didattica Inclusiva", I chose to start from real cases instead of theory: the regulatory framework you find in a training course like this one, the rest has to be built in the field.