Responsibility for the quality of education in Slovenia is shared among
- educational institutions
- public institutes
- evaluation bodies and agencies, and
- the Government.
Responsibilities for administrative control lie with the inspection authorities while the use of public funds is supervised by the Court of audit. The Ministry of Education is responsible for promoting the processes of evaluation and quality assurance in pre-school education, basic and upper secondary schools and, to a certain extent also in short-cycle higher education programmes.
Self-evaluation of institutions, external evaluations of programmes and institutions and evaluation of the entire education system are stipulated by the law. Each year educational institutions must conduct a self-evaluation and report on it to their management bodies. Thereby they use traditional forms; i.e.
- annual analysis of overall students' success
- reports of the school inspectorate, and
- analyses of the results of external students' examinations and the findings of national and international research.
In the last ten years, several new forms have been developed. The Ministry of Education, Science and Sport implements them partly through projects and research and partly with systematic regulation. The latter comprise monitoring and evaluation of novelties introduced in preschool institutions and schools; evaluation studies and international evaluations. The law obligates public research and development institutes to assess the effects of the introduction of novelties in school practice. Therefore their main task is to monitor the development of pre-school institutions and schools, provide them with professional support during the transfer of new findings into practice and assess the quality of practice implementation.
To coordinate processes related to quality in kindergartens and schools the minister of education delegates members to of the Council for Quality and Evaluation (sl).
Law specifies the systematic external assessment of pupils and upper secondary students as a form of external evaluation. Please see chapter 5.3 6.3 and 6.6 for further information about external assessment. This type of assessment is important both for individual institutions as for annual evaluation of basic school and upper secondary school system. The evaluation of the pre-university education system involves analysis of learning outcomes, findings of evaluation research and targeted research projects, as well as reports on the introduction of innovations in kindergartens and schools.
To assure quality in higher education there are procedures for accreditation of higher education institutions and study programmes, as well as internal and external evaluations in place. Since 2010, all have been the responsibility of the National Agency for High Quality Assurance in Higher Education, except for internal evaluation procedures that are in the domain of higher education institutions.
The Ministry of Education, Science and Sport promotes these activities with funding instruments, as well. It has prioritized the funding of R&D projects linked to quality assurance and it has been developing with projects the evaluation models in school and kindergartens (e.g. Development and implementation of the system of quality evaluation and assurance in educational organisations (sl)).