Education Overview

Croatia views education as a constitutional right where primary education is seen as mandatory and free.  Education is provided and managed by the government.  The government was putting 4% of the GDP towards education which is much lower than other European nations but they are working on increasing that because they signed the Bologna declaration.  Education is broken into Kindergartens where students can be enrolled as early as 1 year old, elementary education is for students 7 years of age to 15 years and is 8 years, secondary school which is optional and higher education or university.  Croatia has a literacy rate of about 98.1%.

Schools' Access to Information and Communication Technologies (Stage 4)

Since about 2005 Croatia has started to implement and stress the importance of technology in the classrooms.  The infrastructure is managed and maintained by the Croatian Academic and Research Network (CARNet).  With the infrastructure updates primary and secondary students are able to access their educational content outside of the university and classroom such as their homes or dormitories.  The availability for the intranet speeds range from 2Mbp/s to 10Gbp/s.  In 2009 Croatia worked with CARNet and extended technology in the classroom by connecting 1300 primary and secondary schools with Cisco's network (IP NGN).  This connected the schools on Croatia's many islands with the mainline schools allowing them to provide virtual lectures, email, video conferencing and connecting smart boards.  This initiative provided high speed connections by adding Cisco's Routers, Switches and Firewalls.  Technology and content and connectivity is improving and available in many schools within Croatia.

Enhancing Eduation with ICT's (Stage 3)

Teachers in Croatia are learning to use technology in classrooms from each other and seminars.  Teachers are connecting around the world using Tweets, ning, skype, blogs, and wiki's.  They have been provided with the technology and infrastructure and are slowly learning to use this and enhance the learning in their classrooms through trial and error and conferences.

Developing the ICT Workforce (Stage 3)

The competitiveness that has started to grow in Croatia in the last decade has helped to provide and grow the ongoing training and assistance that companies and third party resources are providing for Croatian's.  Companies such as Deloitte are putting together more formal programs for counties such as Croatia and there are other less structured classes and offerings from companies and other third parties in Croatia.  Although a lot of these programs are new and just being developed they are starting to gain traction and structure through each coming year.