PDP vs PEI: the difference and how to request a PDP

September is the month of messages that begin like this: “we have the dyslexia diagnosis that came in July, school starts again in a week, what do we do now?”. Or: “they talked to us about a PDP, but the maths teacher said we need the PEI, and we did not understand the difference”.

The two acronyms are not synonyms and they do not concern the same students. Mixing them up costs time, and in September time counts: a certificate handed in before lessons begin produces a plan that is already in force by the first test in October; the same certificate handed in in December arrives when the first failing grades are already in the register.

Here I put things in line in the order in which a family needs them: who certifies what, what the difference is between PDP and PEI, how to hand in the paperwork, what must be written inside a well-made PDP and how to turn that sheet of paper into a study afternoon that works. I am not a neuropsychologist and I do not make diagnoses: the clinical part is done by others. What I see, as a tutor, is the part after that, that is, what happens when the plan exists but nobody uses it.

The two acronyms in ten lines

PDP stands for Piano Didattico Personalizzato (Personalised Learning Plan). It concerns students with a DSA (disturbi specifici dell’apprendimento, specific learning disorders: dyslexia, dysgraphia, dysorthography, dyscalculia; law 170/2010) and students with a BES (bisogni educativi speciali, special educational needs) of another kind. It does not include a support teacher: the programme stays that of the class, with the same objectives and the same assessment. What changes are the tools the student uses to get there and the timing with which they are assessed.

PEI stands for Piano Educativo Individualizzato (Individualised Educational Plan). It concerns students with a certified disability under law 104/1992. It includes the support teacher (insegnante di sostegno), an Operational Working Group (Gruppo di Lavoro Operativo) that includes the family and specialists, and, when needed, learning objectives different from those of the class.

The difference in one sentence: the PDP changes the road, the PEI can also change the destination. A student with a PDP sits the same test as their classmates, with a calculator and twenty extra minutes; a student with a PEI may sit a test designed around their own objectives.

Third case, which generates half the confusion: ADHD. Certified as a neurodevelopmental disorder, it gives the right to a PDP, like the DSA; if the certification also recognises a disability under law 104, you move to the PEI. Neither the family nor the school decides this: the document you have in your hand says so. Before talking to the teachers, look at which laws it cites.

Who certifies a DSA, and how long it takes

Law 170/2010 entrusts the certification to the National Health Service (Servizio Sanitario Nazionale). In the Regions where public services cannot cover the demand, the certification can come from private facilities or specialists accredited by the Region.

This is where families get lost: the rule varies from Region to Region. In some, the diagnosis of an accredited private provider is fully valid at school from the day you hand it in; in others it first goes through a validation group of the local health authority (ASL), and until then the school holds a document that is “pending”. There is no single national answer: it is on the website of your ASL or of the regional school office (ufficio scolastico regionale), and it is the first phone call to make.

There is one thing, though, that almost nobody knows: the ministerial circular of 6 March 2013 on BES allows the class council (consiglio di classe, the teachers of the class) to activate a PDP even while awaiting the final certification, on the basis of the documentation available. If you have a private diagnosis and are waiting for validation, you can ask in writing for a provisional plan. Some schools do not know they can do this, and a written request citing the circular closes the discussion in two days.

On times and costs I tell you what I see, with the warning that these are orders of magnitude and not official data. In the public system, the wait for a full assessment is measured in months, not weeks, with enormous differences between areas. In the private sector a full diagnostic assessment (interview, battery of tests, report) is of the order of several hundred euros, with strong variation by city and by centre. To families who start from the private route I still recommend getting on the list in the public system too: the list keeps moving and the validation arrives without starting again from scratch.

One last note, not a detail: the DSA certification must be updated at the change of school cycle, on entering middle school and high school. If the diagnosis dates from Year 3 of primary school and your child is in Year 1 of high school, the document must be renewed: the school may legitimately ask for it.

What to do now, in order

This is the sequence I recommend to a family that has the certification in hand in September.

1. Have the certification registered at the school office. Do not hand it to the maths teacher in the corridor and do not send it only by email to the coordinator: it must be deposited at the school office (segreteria didattica) with a registration number (protocollo), and you keep the receipt. It officially starts the procedure and gives you a certain date if a problem arises later.
2. Ask for a meeting with the class coordinator within the first two weeks. Not to “recommend” the child: to say where they get stuck. “Reads slowly” says little; “reads the text three times and gets lost at the second condition, but if I read it aloud to them they solve it” says everything, and from there a real measure is born.
3. Take part in drawing up the PDP. It is an act of the class council, but it must be drafted collegially and shared with the family: it is not a form that arrives already signed. If they hand it to you already filled in, you have the right to read it, ask for changes and have your comments put on record.
4. Check the deadlines. The common practice is for the PDP to be drawn up within the first term, that is, between the end of November and the beginning of December. It is not a binding deadline that is the same across Italy: your school’s internal circular may set its own, and it is worth asking for it.
5. Reread it in February. The PDP is a living document: if a measure is no longer needed, or one is needed that was not there, it is updated on request to the coordinator.

If the school does not respond, the ladder is: class coordinator → the school’s inclusion lead → head teacher (dirigente scolastico), with a written request. It almost always ends at the first or second rung, as long as the request is concrete.

What must be inside a PDP that works

I have read many PDPs. The useless ones can be recognised at once: long, full of generic phrases (“enhance strengths”, “foster self-esteem”) and without a single instruction that a teacher can apply on Tuesday morning during a test. A useful PDP is specific and divides into two families of measures.

Compensatory tools (strumenti compensativi): things the student can use:

• calculator (and, where needed, a graphing calculator);
• formula sheet or table of formulas during tests;
• concept maps and diagrams produced by the student;
• speech synthesis and books in digital format;
• unit conversion tables, periodic table, table of irregular verbs;
• the teacher’s notes or a recording of the lesson.

Dispensatory measures (misure dispensative): things the student is not required to do, or to do in the same way:

• longer times (generally up to 30% more) or a test reduced in the number of exercises, at the same level of difficulty;
• scheduled oral tests (interrogazioni), not by surprise;
• exemption from reading aloud in class;
• reduction of the homework load, in particular of repetitive exercises;
• assessment of the content and not the form in written work (spelling, handwriting);
• for foreign languages, giving priority to oral over written work when the diagnosis justifies it.

Two clarifications that I always repeat, because they are the source of almost all the clashes with teachers.

The first: the PDP does not lower the objectives. Your child must be able to solve the quadratic equation like everyone else. The calculator removes the calculation error that was eating their marks, not the solving formula. Whoever presents the PDP as a discount is preparing a conflict for next year, when the level goes up.

The second: the formula sheet must be built, not photocopied. A student who writes their own formula sheet, and reorders it three times during the year, ends up consulting it little because in the meantime they have learned it. Whoever receives a printed formula sheet looks at it throughout the test and learns nothing. It is the difference between using the maps and being handed them.

Two concrete cases

Case 1: dyscalculia, Year 2 of high school, failing grade in maths. PDP active since Year 1, a 4.5 on the first test on radicals, a family convinced that the PDP “does not work”. We look at the test together: the mistakes are not calculation mistakes, they are about the conditions of existence: in $\sqrt{x-3}$ they had not written $x\ge 3$. No compensatory measure solves a rule that has not been studied: the plan was right, a piece of the programme was missing. Four weeks on conditions of existence, next test a 6.5. When the grade does not go up, before calling the plan into question you have to work out whether the problem is the channel (reading, writing, calculating) or the content.

Case 2: dyslexia, Year 3 of high school, physics. A student with dyslexia, a PDP with extra time and a formula sheet. She did badly in problems but well in numerical exercises: the bottleneck was the ten-line text, which she read to the end losing the initial data along the way. We added a routine, not a tool: read the text only once with a pencil in hand, write the data in a column with the unit of measurement and the question, and only then reason. Three weeks to make it automatic. The extra time of the PDP became a safety net instead of a chase: with $v_0=12$ m/s, $a=-2$ m/s² and the request for the braking distance already written in a column, the right formula arrives because you are looking at the data and not at a wall of words.

The calculation is trivial. The point was to get there with the data in order.

How we train test timing

Extra time is the most requested measure and the worst used. The PDP grants extra minutes, but almost nobody trains the student to manage them: you stay stuck for twenty minutes on the second question and the margin is burned there.

For this reason, with a student with a PDP, I always do two or three timed trials at home, first under classroom conditions and then with the extended time. The site’s practice tests in maths and physics are good for this: they are organised by year and by topic (radicals in Year 2, parabola in Year 3, trigonometry in Year 4, derivatives in Year 5), they have the same format as a class test and they do not penalise mistakes. The correct answer to each question is free and needs no registration; the step-by-step guided solution unlocks with your first lesson.

The practical rule: do the practice test with the standard time and mark where you had got to when time ran out, then redo it with the extended time and see which exercises you recovered. If there is recovery, that measure of the PDP works and should be defended. If nothing changes, the problem is not time but content, and you go to the class council with that data in hand, not with an impression.

What an outside tutor can (and cannot) do

A tutor does not certify, does not draw up the PDP and does not take part in the class council. What they can do, very concretely, is three things.

Translate the plan into habits. “Use of concept maps” written in the PDP is a phrase, not a habit. The habit is that the student, on Wednesday afternoon, knows how to build the map of a chapter in twenty minutes without copying it from the book: it is taught, it is trained, and after a couple of months it runs on its own.

Close the gaps beneath the diagnosis. A DSA does not on its own explain a 4 in maths: underneath there are almost always holes in the programme from previous years that nobody in class has had time to close again. It is slow work, and it is what moves the average. How I set it up subject by subject you will find on the pages for maths and physics, and in the post on how to study maths without stress.

Lower the emotional temperature. A student who has been collecting low grades for years arrives at the test convinced in advance that they will get it wrong, and that conviction is worth one grade less. I wrote about it in how to manage test anxiety: it applies to everyone, here it applies double.

How we work: one-to-one online lessons, one or two a week depending on the load, with materials and exercises that stay with the student. The rates (single lesson or 10-hour package) are on the pricing page. Payment is offline: bank transfer, Satispay, PayPal or Revolut. No minimum duration.

In practice, this week

If you have got this far with a certification in hand and school about to start again, the order is this:

1. have the certification registered at the school office and keep the registration number;
2. check on the website of the ASL or the regional school office whether in your Region the private diagnosis is immediately valid or goes through validation;
3. ask for a meeting with the coordinator within the first two weeks and bring concrete examples, not adjectives;
4. insist on reading and discussing the PDP before signing, and check that the measures can be applied during a real test;
5. try out the measures at home, with a timed practice test, before the October test does it for you.

If you are choosing a secondary school, the question about compensatory tools should be asked before enrolment: in the post on the open day calendar I have set out the deadlines to respect.

If you would like to talk through how to organise your child’s study afternoon, or which gaps to close first, write to me from the contact page: the first conversation is to understand where they really get stuck, and from there we decide whether a hand is needed or whether it is enough to fix the method.