The participation of practitioners in the process of creating and implementing education policies

One of the important preconditions for the implementation of a functional education policy is that key decisions in the domain of education policy are taken following consultations with those who will be directly implementing these decisions. The aim of our research was to examine how school pedagogists perceive the participation of education practitioners in the process of creating and implementing education policies. More specifically, we sought to identify all those who participated in the creation of current reform solutions in education, and to find out to what extent education practitioners are motivated to get involved in the process of creating and implementing education policies and why. The research sample consisted of 159 pedagogists working in primary and secondary schools across the Republic of Serbia. The data, collected through a survey, indicate that practitioners, from the point of view of school pedagogists, do not take an active part in the process of shaping and implementing education policies. The experience of not taking into account the practitioners' perspective, even not giving them the opportunity to be asked for their input, contributes to reform solutions being perceived as imposed from above, non-relevant and inappropriate to the local context, which is borne out by the findings of this research. Such circumstances have a detrimental effect on education practitioners' motivation for implementing educational-political decisions and the suppression of resistance to changes.