Legislation in Education: An Analysis of the Slovenian Legislation Based on the Guidelines for Better Regulation

Many critiques, that have recently been expressed in the field of education summarize, that schools are overwhelmed with administrative tasks, which among other include arranging legal matters. One cause may lie in the lack of knowledge in the field of dealing with legal matters, since the results of the research show, that arranging of legal matters is perceived as a very difficult task for Slovenian principals. The question here is, if the difficulty also arises from a poor legislation. The paper presents a text analysis of the Slovenian legislation in the field of education, based on the guidelines for a better regulation, set in the Slovenian Resolution on Legislative Regulation. The quality status was verified by searching for poor regulation, as it follows from the Resolution on Legislative Regulation. Legal regulation with poor quality laws is marked by excessive regulation, not sufficiently precise legal norms, constantly changing requirements and even changing laws with other laws, causing lack of transparency and instability. The analysis includes a review of legal acts, governing the field of education, their scope and the number of amendments to individual legal acts as well as the number of changes by other acts. The results of the analysis give a reason for concern, since the teachers and principals experience an overload of regulation in the relationship to autonomy and accountability.