IISS Ettore Majorana - Italy

IISS Ettore Majorana, a state-run upper secondary school in Brindisi, Puglia, serves 1,285 students aged 13–18 with a staff of 175. Rooted in a region where industrial excellence sits alongside deep social inequality — and where school dropout is a real risk for many families — Majorana has built an international reputation for proving that public schools in the South of Italy can lead, not follow, the global education agenda. Under Head Teacher Salvatore Giuliano, the institute has made equity, innovation, and digital dignity the three pillars of its work.

Its signature achievement is Book in Progress, launched in 2009 in response to the prohibitive cost of textbooks. Teachers co-author and continuously update the learning materials themselves, eliminating publishers and adapting content to students' real needs. What began as a local fix is now a national movement: dozens of Italian schools, materials across 20+ disciplines, thousands of teachers trained, and tens of millions of euros saved for Italian families over fifteen years. Majorana graduates achieve an employment rate 25% above the regional average, many progress to university, and several have founded startups in emerging technology sectors.

The school's current flagship is Book in Progress AI (bookinprogress.ai) — and this is where its Global Schools Prize case truly stands out. Unlike almost every other AI-in-education platform worldwide, Book in Progress AI is built entirely on the school's own servers using local language models. Nothing goes to commercial clouds. It is privacy-by-design, open source, multilingual, and completely free. Students get a 24/7 AI tutor, a "Genius" mode that adapts content to visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners, virtual STEM laboratories, and dedicated tools for special educational needs. Teachers become "content editors" empowered by AI-assisted authoring, image and simulation generation, and a national collaborative network.

Majorana embeds AI responsibly across the whole ecosystem. Students co-design AI systems — one team built a chatbot helping middle-schoolers choose the right upper secondary pathway, addressing a real local dropout issue. Ethics, bias analysis, fact-checking, and source verification are woven into every subject. Teachers receive structured, multi-level training with peer mentoring. Parents are invited to hands-on workshops, focus groups, and advisory committees, turning potential resistance into community alliance. During COVID-19, Majorana's mature digital infrastructure kept learning fully continuous.

Should Majorana win the Prize, the funds would go to upgraded server infrastructure so Book in Progress AI can be offered free of charge to schools worldwide — particularly in economically disadvantaged contexts where commercial AI licenses are out of reach. The ambition is a global community of practice where teachers on every continent co-create AI-enhanced, privacy-respecting learning materials in their own languages.

Majorana's story is the story of a public school that refused to wait for permission to innovate. It is living proof that world-class, ethical, sovereign AI in education does not need to be expensive, extractive, or imported — it can be built locally, shared generously, and scaled globally.