The project relies on high professionalism by involving the best education experts in Slovakia for the individual segments of education, along with the participation of international experts.2 Expert supervision over the project will be performed by the board of senior professionals including internationally acknowledged experts for individual segments of education (we will approach people from the OECD, the World Bank, European research institutes, such as Eurydice, foreign universities and successful reformers in education).
We will merge the work of researchers and non-governmental organisations dealing with education reforms, and thus we will ensure a more unified support for our proposals by experts and avoid duplicating capacities3.
This is a long-term project, as a quality education reform cannot be prepared over a few months, which is a typical time frame of previous education reforms. As we have no pressure of political deadlines, our project provides us with an opportunity to thoroughly analyse and comprehend individual problems in education, discuss them with all relevant stakeholders in education, familiarise in detail with best practices abroad, precisely formulate our proposals, and also carry out pilot projects to test our proposals in practice. All this will lead to proposing a well-thought-out, comprehensive and evidence-based education reform, which will enable our children succeed in future challenges.
The long term nature of the project also makes it possible to focus on communication, something that used to be missing in previously implemented reforms. The change cannot succeed without thorough communication with the broad public as well as experts and stakeholders influenced by the change. Both Slovak and foreign experience shows that the insufficient communication of changes and the lack of discussion about changes constitute one of the reasons behind their failures.
The project will not produce just another report "ending in a drawer", but will provide realistic and feasible tools for public policy for three reasons:
2 The identified weaknesses of the Slovak education system were discussed with the majority of relevant education experts in Slovakia in June 2016. At the same time, the outline of the education vision was discussed with acknowledged international and Slovak experts.
3 The initial analysis was carried out by people from three non-governmental organisations: pre-primary, primary, and secondary education by SGI, higher education by MESA 10, and draft scenarios for the vision of education by the We Want To Know More initiative.