Republic of Bulgaria as a candidate-country for accession to the Eurepean Union takes into account the European strategies, policies and practices in the domain of education and training in development of its national policy. The report “Education and Training 2010: Bulgarian contributions to 2006” from the Bulgarian government takes stock of its progress towards the Lisbon-related goals and looks broadly at the reforms of the Bulgarian education system.  The following offers highlights from this report:

• Bulgaria’s basic priorities are to ensure order and stability in the education and development of the system for vocational qualification, re-qualification, and LLL. Reforming the education is set in front of the important task: to ensure conditions for vocational preparation that give an opportunity for further support of the quality of the work power and its employability in accordance with the requirements of the labour market and knowledge-based economics. Currently, a national system of indicators for monitoring and accounting of related progress is being developed in Bulgaria.
• With respect to implement the goals of the Bologna process, the recent changes in the Law of Higher Education, published in State Gazette ¹ 48 on 04.06.2004 set the legislative base to overcome the basic obstacles for transparency of the qualifications given by the Bulgarian higher schools, and mobility.
• In accordance with the priorities indicated in the government programme, part Education and Science”, the Ministry of Education and Science is making great efforts and is investing to improve the quality of the teachers staff by organizing short-term and long-term courses for qualification of teachers as in new training contents as well as in new training methods; to work in multi-ethnics environment; investing by priorities in training the teachers in foreign language and informatics, taking on account the need of such knowledge in EU; improving the teachers qualification by collaboration with scientific societies and foundations.
• During 2005-2010, the accession of the Republic of Bulgaria to EU shall enforce more various approaches for studying foreign languages to be introduced. It will be of great importance in conditions of extended cultural cooperation between the European countries.
  
• The educational system in Bulgaria ensures development of various learning pathways and opened learning opportunities too. It gives opportunities for improvement the educational and qualification level of training in LLL context.
• Bulgaria is one of the first countries that have accepted the requirements of Bologna declaration. By accepting the Law of Higher Education in 1995, its modifications and supplements in 1999, the beginning is set to develop the new model of higher education. In view to be more competitive in European and world scale, the Bulgarian higher schools enhance their collaboration with European universities to design jointed training programmes.

The main difficulties in the education and training system are financial and related to development of the technical equipment and didactic base. Financing by voucher system is based on investing redirection from direct subsidizing of the schools and the universities to the direct users of the service (students in the schools and in the higher schools). Introducing the voucher system is hindered of the lack of legislative base and a lack of good practices in the country. Also, larger popularization is necessary with respect to the national and European strategies, policies and concrete documents concerning the education and training on all levels and educational degrees, including vocational training, adult training, and the work power’s level of professional qualification in Europe and in the world.