ANALYSIS OF THE CREATION OF A JOINT AGENCY WITHIN THE AREA OF ADMINISTRATION OF THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

Client: Ministry of Education and Research

Period: 2019

The Ministry of Education and Research (HTM) is responsible for providing children with access to an education that helps them succeed in life. This is a difficult task and many institutions, both at state and local government level, contribute to this task. In the summer of 2018 consolidation of the state-level implementation agencies of the HTM was considered with the aim to achieve a more coherent policy implementation and reduce the amount of time spent on coordinating the inter-agency cooperation.
Our task was to analyse the current situation and to propose possible solutions for the reorganisation of the area of administration of the Ministry of Education and Research. We first mapped the services offered by nine the institutions in the Ministry’s area of administration and based on that we evaluated multiple alternative combinations of institutions for organising the provision of services. We proposed three different scenarios for the restructure of the Ministry’s area of administration.

The starting point for all the proposed scenarios is a structure based on the sectoral logic of policy making, according to which each policy area (education, youth work, science and Estonian language) could have its own implementer (one scenario). Scenarios two and three combine the implementation of youth work and education policies into a single body, assuming that policies supporting human development across the life cycle are to be designed and implemented coherently. Moving towards seamless education and the integration of formal and non-formal learning, it may be appropriate to implement these areas through a single authority. The analysis helps to better understand the potential benefits and risks of reorganisation and provides a good starting point for the great amount of work that still needs to be done to reform successfully.