Digital transformation and national curriculum reform of primary and lower secondary schools

The Commission supported the Slovak education authorities, in cooperation with the World Bank, in learning from other countries how to effectively implement the upcoming curricular and digital transformation reforms, but also to build the innovation capacity of the Slovak primary schools, which generated insights for the Ministry of Education on how to calibrate the upcoming reforms for better results.

Context

The Slovak education authorities were clear about how they wanted to improve the education outcomes and pupil 21st century skills in the Recovery and Resilience Plan. What they needed support with was how to implement the complex set of investments and reforms managed by different institutions for better results.

The Ministry of Education took an innovative approach (results accelerators) to simulate at the level of schools what it looks like when the different strands of reforms come together, what else would be needed to start turning them into the expected results and how to measure the intermediary progress.

Support delivered

• Two waves of results accelerators with Slovak primary schools on “How to teach differently with ICT as an accelerator of pedagogical change” with a summary of models that can be replicated by other schools, promoted through a dedicated Youtube channel and Facebook page
• Methodology for using results accelerators in the public administration setting
• Comparative study on how other selected EU countries effectively implemented the curricular reforms
• Methodology for operationalization of the curricular reform into practice

Results achieved

The Ministry of Education got first the proof of concept that the results accelerators work to kickstart the implementation of reforms to school practice. In the analytical paper the Ministry published, it recommends to use the approach further by a network of up to 100 mentors of regional centres.

The main lesson that the ministry took is that rather than to prescribe blanket solutions to schools, it is more effective to ask them to use data to identify their gaps vis-à-vis reform objectives and experiment with how best to achieve improvements in their particular school setting.

More about the project

You can read the final report and related documents here:

• General publications
• 17 October 2023

Digital transformation and national curriculum reform of primary and lower secondary schools in Slovakia