Croatian education system is centrally managed by the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports (MSES). Besides MSES, other national public bodies involved in the regulation, development and quality control of the educational sector in Croatia are Education and Teacher Training Agency, Agency for Vocational Education and Training, Agency for Science and Higher Education, Agency for Mobility and EU Programmes and National Center for External Evaluation of Education.
Early education and child care is financed and managed by local authorities, while MSES provides central guidance, accreditation and control over the educational programmes which are implemented in organizations providing early education and child care.
Primary and lower secondary education is organised as a single structure system, beginning at the age of 6 and consisting of eight years of compulsory schooling. Upper secondary education is not compulsory, but almost all students do enrol into the general or vocational upper secondary courses upon completing lower primary level. In primary and secondary education segment, special care is dedicated to the possibilities for education of students of national minorities in their mother tongue. Besides the regular schools which provide tuition in Croatian, a number of schools – almost fifty - provide tuition in Serbian, Italian, Czech and Hungarian languages. Just as national minority students can, according to their own decision, enrol into regular schools providing tuition in Croatian, students of Croatian nationality can – and quite a few of them indeed do – enrol into schools providing tuition in some of the minority languages.
Higher education is provided by the universities - most of them public - whose organizational autonomy and academic freedom in teaching and research is guaranteed by the Croatian Constitution. Great majority of funding for higher education is provided by the state, covering such items as salaries for academic staff, capital investment and running costs for academic institutions, research funds, student subsistence and tuition fees and other.