Slovenia higher education reform aims to create a supportive environment for students and teachers

Slovenia’s ministry of higher education is gearing up for substantial reform of its public universities towards sustainability and climate resilience. These activities are the fruit of the strategic collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC under the Deep Demonstration programme of Circular Regenerative Economies in Slovenia. The initiative aims to introduce a circular economy in the country by activating a coordinated portfolio of innovation actions in key economic sectors and selected value chains through cooperation with Slovenian ministries and local stakeholders. EIT Climate-KIC brings a systemic approach, stakeholder engagement and knowledge transfer focused on transforming the education system to the Slovenian governance system. 

QUOTE: “We would not have been so ambitious if we didn’t come across and became a part of the EIT Climate-KIC Deep Demonstration project,” says Duša Marjetič, Head of the Qualification division at the Ministry of Education and Sciences in Slovenia.

The Slovenian minister of higher education has engaged in a reform of the Slovenian higher education system under the recovery and resilience mechanism. The reform focuses on green and digital transitions. Its main objective, according to Duša Marjetič, Head of the Qualification division at the Ministry of Education and Sciences in Slovenia, is to “enable the universities and the higher education system to respond more quickly to the changes in society and in the labour market.”

The Ministry of Education reached out to EIT Climate-KIC quite early in the reform process, as they wanted to understand how to make this work at a systemic level. Ninety per cent of students in Slovenia study in one of the country’s public universities. “Our aim is to ensure that Slovenian universities become more adaptable, resilient, and responsive to the needs of their environment,” says Marjetič.

They soon realised that it wouldn’t just be a matter of introducing some changes to the education systems. Marjetič explains: “We knew that universities would need to change quite quickly but what we understood working with EIT Climate-KIC is that the entire system, including us at the ministry, would have to introduce some changes. We understood that we especially needed to change our mindset.”

For Duša Marjetič and her team, the main barrier to change was their own normative framework and the way the administration works. She says: “We, at the ministry, realised that we were going to need to adapt to a faster pace of change.” The universities, on the other hand, seemed to be ready to take the next steps, and it was as if they had been waiting for a signal to come from the government level.

An innovative way to reform, starting with pilot projects

In the past, the Minister would give the universities a broad framework for the reform, and the universities would have to figure out many of the details of implementing the change on their own. Now, universities and the team behind the reform are working hand-in-hand and learning from each other on what has to change.

Putting in place legislation can take a lot of time. But the climate challenge doesn’t wait, so the Minister has found a way to start implementing changes to the system by launching a series of 32 specific, diverse and interdisciplinary pilot projects to start addressing the green digital transition and micro-credentials across public universities. These pilot projects aim to find new ways to change the paradigm in which the universities operate. “The idea is to find new innovative approaches, and understand what works, and what does not work in the field that we’re trying to reform.”

The Faculty of Law for instance is looking into ways to teach digital skills to future lawyers, who often don’t understand how electronically supported administrative procedures function. Marjetič notes that this could even provide some interesting insights to the Slovenian Ministry of Public Affairs. In another example, in the region of Gorenjska, they connected the pilot project to all the employers in the IT sector and created micro-credentials for specific skills needed in the region.

The pilot projects are just the beginning. The results will be used by the Minister to prepare a blueprint for investing in a green, resilient, sustainable and digitally connected education system by 2026. The government and universities are already working together to address the barriers that have been identified so that the reform can move forward.

It’s much more than a reform of the higher education system

The reform isn’t just about higher education, explains Marjetič. “This is a comprehensive reform where we include all areas of the higher education content related to digitalisation, infrastructure (buildings, equipment, broadband, connectivity), and normative framework across the curriculum.” The idea is to think about the role that higher education can play in economic recovery, increasing productivity, and promoting cohesion. She also emphasises that this isn’t only about the environmental and economic development of Slovenia. It could inspire other countries in the European Union.

“One of the main things we learned working with EIT Climate-KIC on this project is that we need to change the way we operate,” says Marjetič. She explains that governments often work according to outdated models that are not adaptable to the challenges of this century. These models don’t allow for comprehensive solutions and complex changes, they respond to rigid systems, with top-down management, which hinders cooperation. She adds: “This is something that we now have evidence that we have to change. We especially learned the importance of policy innovation, especially to learn jointly how to translate these ministries’ resolutions into effective actions and measures.”

Slovenia intends to move away from the individual, incremental projects, and plans to apply an approach of creating and implementing a portfolio of strategic, coordinated interventions. The idea is to find points of intervention that will allow for a smooth transformation through coordinated cross-sectoral action. This requires a deep dive into their governance model.

“EIT Climate-KIC portfolio approach made us realise that the way we were thinking about our resolutions was no longer the best way. Our Strategy for higher education is now shaped slightly differently than before, allowing for more flexibility. We are working on an action plan and looking for an approach to flexible monitoring and then connecting it to the objectives of the strategy. We have a clear framework that follows the principle of continuous improvement and induces learning groups. We have done this together with EIT Climate-KIC for our pilot projects, and we have seen that it works and now we are trying to upscale it to the system level.”

In the second phase of the project, the teams are going to focus on breaking the siloes and building connections between higher education and research, as this was seen as an important space for intervention. “These are different divisions of the same ministry, and the idea is to understand how we can create synergies and make them cooperate. The goal is to implement cooperation, not only at the ministerial level but also at the level of higher education and research centres. There are a lot of opportunities to bring these two together and we aim to achieve this by 2030,” says Marjetič.

We asked Duša Marjetič what would a climate-resilient future look like for her. She says the division between humans and the natural world is no longer appropriate. “We need to put nature at the centre of everything, and we will reach a climate-resilient future by teaching future generations to recognise this. Future and current generations should learn to live in harmony with nature and understand how our actions affect the environment. We need to be able to use technology and all the progress that comes with it, to reduce our environmental impact. And we have to build resilience as a society to adapt to climate change without major societal shocks.”