Bureaucratisation of the Teaching Profession in Decentralised Vocational Education—The Case of Slovenia, Europe

Abstract

Since 2001, Slovenian vocational education has undergone major changes at the curricular and financing levels, particularly moving towards competence-based and open curricula and the decentralisation of responsibilities. Both tendencies have changed the role of the teacher, who has become a team worker with many new responsibilities in planning, assessment and evaluation of the pedagogical process. Reform measures are regularly evaluated, and research findings are an important source of information for reforms. In our secondary analysis of selected evaluations, we attempt to prove our thesis that the teacher's autonomy has, despite this decentralisation, not increased in terms of better conditions for the students' development. Instead, it has resulted in teachers becoming exhausted by paperwork, the purpose of which they do not realise due to poor training and difficult working conditions. The article proves that the potential positive outcomes of the reforms can be lost if reform instruments are abused for political and/or economic purposes, if the swiftness and content of the reforms are dictated by the European (financial) policies and particularistic political interests, and/or if the school is reformed according to the rules of the market.

Decentralised Education Policy in Indonesia

“…As a result, it might adversely impact on teachers' effort in conducting the classroom. As in the instance of Slovenia with the curricular reform in the country, teachers tended to be overloaded with constructing the curriculum and doing supervision, thereby spending less time engaging with the students (Ermenc & Mažgon, 2015). Similarly, despite the significant increase of the status and the allowance of the teaching profession with the certification policy, no substantial distinctions was apparent before and after the certification program in terms of either the teachers' expertise in classroom teaching practices or students' learning outcomes (De Ree, Muralidharan, Pradhan, & Rogers, 2017; Kusumawardhani, 2017).…”

Raising living standards and supporting investment by boosting skills in Slovenia

“…To address the lack of problem-solving skills the government introduced reforms to vocational education in 2011 to increase the use of problem-solving and experimental-learning teaching methods. However, adopting problem-solving-based learning requires that teachers be given the necessary pedagogical training, and so far this has been lacking (Ermenc and Mažgon, 2015). Such a lack of further training is characteristic of life-long learning in Slovenia as a whole (discussed below).…”