Socrates and Leonardo da Vinci in Slovenia

This study presents the impact assessment evaluation of European education and training programmes Socrates II and Leonardo da Vinci II, in Slovenia. The evaluation carried out in 2007 aims to determine the programme objective areas with greatest impact and the areas where objectives were falling behind. Generally, the impacts of actions for all objectives are at least small. With this regard, evaluation confirmed that certain degree of success is noticeable in all evaluated actions and both European education and training programmes. The impact of actions and programmes, however, differs from objective to objective. According to the findings, the evaluated actions have two stronger lines of impact. The first, perhaps the strongest pronounced one, manifests itself in the impact on raising the level of competency of individuals. The first one mostly regards improving the knowledge of foreign languages, skills and competences of participants in the field of vocational education. A strong impact is noticeable in terms of vocational development of participants as well. The second line, somewhat less pronounced, is noticeable in the area of cooperation, mostly in the aspect of increasing the extent of international cooperation between educational organisations and other enterprises. The participants of evaluated actions and programmes consider the actions they participated in to have a positive impact on raising formal education and as a result on raising social and, to a lesser extent, economic status of participants. This finding puts the impacts of programmes and actions within them into a very positive context since it negates the stereotype that individual mobilities are 'first intended for tourism and only then for obtaining knowledge, skills and information'. Participation in European education and training programmes, mostly in Erasmus action, according to the assessments of groups of younger participants who place themselves in the lowest social class, also represents an important mechanism of vertical social mobility. The study also investigated various differences among programme actions and various sub-groups of final beneficiaries. Upon the evaluation conclusions, recommendations for possible improvements in implementation of the evaluated actions in Slovenia are also presented.