As the newest member of the EU and an aspiring member of OECD, Croatia was aware of the challenges it has been facing to improve its educational system and to reach the standards of some of its European partners.
In October 2014, the Croatian Parliament approved the new National Strategy for Education, Science and Technology, a first step towards the reform. Later that year, a Special Expert Committee for the implementation of the Strategy for the Education, Science and Technology was appointed. The main focus of implementation of the Strategy was the Curriculum reform, i.e. one of the eight aims of the part of the Strategy focusing on preschool, primary and secondary education. The curriculum reform gathered educational experts and teachers using a strong bottom-up approach. The team developed a proposal for a new National Curriculum which represented a significant reform of the existing education system. The reform integrated all school levels and focused on learning outcomes, defining the curriculum as a designed, systemic and harmonised way of regulating, planning, executing and evaluating the education process, which can be defined at different levels: at the level of the complete education system; at the level of its different parts; educational institutions and individuals. The Comprehensive Curricular Reform (CCR) encompasses all segments of the educational system, interconnects them and offers a unified approach. It has introduced a change from the focus on the transfer of content to learning outcomes and the development of competencies. The National Curriculum Framework has defined the aim of education through the vision of a young person who has completed secondary education; specifying the values of the curriculum and competencies which need to be developed at all levels of the educational system. It has also addressed educational structures, principles of the educational process, training of educational staff and evaluation. The main parts of the National Curriculum are: the national curriculum system documents which represent the basis for the development and the application of curriculum at other levels; the application of the national curriculum documents and the evaluation of the aims, expectations, outcomes and processes by which the application and execution of the national documents is followed. The challenge that has been identified was the training of the teachers for the implementation of all changes as well as the training materials and the project really helped with the training of the teachers who have become trainers and mentors of the teachers for the teachers included in the reform. A broader perspective was needed and it was achieved through this project since experts from differen European countries and wider have been included. They have been working with the mentors both online and face-to-face which was helpful as well as the training materials that have been developed.
The immediate planned changes affecting schools and teaching processes have started taking place from the school year 2018/19 and are as follows: introduction of IT as an obligatory subject in the 5th and 6th grades in primary schools and piloting the new curriculum for all subjects in the 1st and 5th grades of primary education and the 1st grade of secondary education. In addition, using the results of the E-School project which focused on STEM subjects (biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics), a new curriculum for biology, chemistry and physics was piloted in the 7th grade at primary level. The Pilot also saw the introduction of cross-curriculum topics as well as the following Frameworks: National Framework Curriculum; Framework for evaluation of processes and learning outcomes; Framework for encouragement and adjustment of learning experiences and evaluation of achievements of students with difficulties; Framework for encouragement of learning experiences and evaluation of achievements of talented students. In April 2017, the Ministry of Science and Education of Croatia (the Ministry) requested a project/support from the Structural Reform Support Service in the planning and the launch of the implementation of the curriculum reform, notably during the first pilot phase of implementation. The support to the Ministry of Science and Education was approved under the SRSS Programme for 2017 (SRSP1). The SRSS support to the implementation of the curriculum reform also served as one of the European Commission Country Specific Recommendations to Croatia for 2017 to accelerate the reform of the education system.