In Agenda Digitale, Nicoletta Pisanu examines favourable opinion no. 787 of 20 October 2026, in which the Italian Data Protection Authority (Garante) reviewed the draft decree of the Ministry of Education and Merit on the use of artificial intelligence for the benefit of students and teachers. The piece includes a comment from Rocco Panetta, Chairman of Panetta Consulting Group.

The Authority’s main concern is that schools should not be left to face these choices alone. The Garante asks the Ministry for ongoing support, including through future guidance and regulatory measures, and suggests helping schools choose suppliers by setting common standards, requirements and models. Its proposals also include standard services made available to schools and a dedicated support service, which would also assist them in their dealings with technology companies.

On the technical side, the draft comes with an annex on organisational and security measures: the systems work with pseudonymised identifiers, while the information linking them to individual students is kept separate and under the school’s control. For this safeguard to work, teachers and pupils need to avoid entering details in their prompts that could identify a student.

In his contribution, Rocco Panetta stresses that AI governance is not only a matter for businesses and public administrations, but for every social institution recognised by the Italian Constitution, schools included, where it takes on unprecedented urgency and complexity. The opinion, he notes, is only a starting point: “we must not delude ourselves that an opinion from the supervisory authority exhausts the obligations”. The Ministry and schools are called on to build awareness and teach young people to use technology responsibly, the first building block of a universal governance of AI.

The article closes with a reflection on how students’ awareness is built through everyday use in the classroom, and on the Ministry’s role in giving schools clear points of reference and a competent counterpart.