Bulgaria has made important economic and governance reforms over the past two decades that have produced impressive rates of economic growth and higher standards of living. At the same time, convergence to average European Union (EU) incomes has been slowing and poverty and other forms of social exclusion persist in rural and remote areas as well as among particular segments of the population.

Over the past five years, Bulgaria has undertaken several reforms to improve the quality of its education system and provide equal opportunities for all students. The country has introduced a new curriculum, policies to develop the teaching profession and attract new teachers, a new school funding model, a dual vocational education and training (VET) system and a compulsory pre-primary year, among others. To ensure that these reforms lead to large-scale improvements in student learning, Bulgaria will need to continue aligning its policies to ensure that they are coherent and provide additional support to help education actors adapt their practice. Policy makers will also need to target resources more effectively, to ensure they flow to the areas where they are most needed, namely the most vulnerable students, the most sought-after teachers and to supporting the lowest-performing schools.

Over the past three decades, Bulgaria has carried out important structural reforms which, alongside accession to the European Union (EU) in 2007, have contributed to robust economic growth and improved living standards (OECD, 2021[1]). Despite these efforts, convergence towards EU and OECD income levels has been slower than in other Central and East European countries. Economic growth is concentrated in regions with large cities, exports are dominated by primary goods and poverty remains high, particularly among ethnic minorities (OECD, 2021[2]). Demographic decline is producing additional pressures, with many rural regions suffering from both depopulation and rapid ageing. Positively, Bulgaria has seen strong performance in high value-added sectors, such as information and communication technology (ICT), where labour productivity appears more than twice the average rate recorded for the non-financial business economy (OECD, 2021[2]). Continued growth in these sectors could enable Bulgaria to boost its economic competitiveness and create more highly skilled jobs but this will be contingent on reforms in a range of areas, including education and skills.

Over the past three decades, Bulgaria has carried out important structural reforms that have helped the country reach higher levels of socio-economic development. However, overall productivity gains have not fully translated into sustainable and inclusive growth: Bulgaria continues to face high levels of poverty and there are large educational disparities according to geographical location and socio-economic background. This chapter provides an introduction on how evaluation and assessment in Bulgaria’s education system can support more effective teaching and learning, thereby directing the sector towards greater excellence and equity.

Bulgaria’s Pre-school and School Education Act (2016) introduced a new competency-based curriculum, new learning standards and more formative approaches to assessing students, including the use of start-of-year diagnostic tests and the implementation of qualitative marking. However, while these policies have the potential to enhance learning, changes in school and classroom assessment practices have been slow to implement and the country’s high-stakes selection and examinations culture continues to reinforce the perception of student assessment as a primarily summative exercise. This chapter recommends tangible steps Bulgaria can take to use assessment as a means to improve teaching and learning.

Bulgaria has introduced several reforms that aim to enhance the teaching profession. For example, Bulgaria introduced a differentiated career structure for teachers, increased salaries and made continuous professional learning a mandatory requirement. Bulgaria has also updated the core content for initial teacher education, eliminated tuition fees for many initial teacher education programmes and updated the country’s teacher standards. Despite this progress, there is a growing need for greater coherence across initiatives, especially as these reforms have important financial implications for the government. This chapter looks at how Bulgaria could link changes to structural teacher policies in order to help recruit the best and most motivated teacher candidates, as well as encourage practising teachers to develop their competencies.

Bulgaria has a longstanding culture of elite schools that reinforce educational inequalities. To address this issue, the country recently introduced a new school evaluation system that includes several features commonly found in OECD education systems, such as new school quality standards and a new National Inspectorate of Education, which has an inspection cycle that targets low-performing schools. This chapter examines how Bulgaria can fully implement its new school evaluation framework to build a better understanding of what school quality means and direct stakeholders towards the common goal of increasing the equity and quality of the education system can help strengthen the school evaluation process and ensure that Bulgaria’s new Inspectorate, REDs and schools themselves all work.

Bulgaria has a national vision for its education system and is modernising education data systems to help track progress and evaluate policy. While some of the basic components needed to monitor and evaluate education reforms already exist, many of Bulgaria’s national tools and processes for system evaluation remain nascent and communication among different actors is not adequate to build trust in the reforms. This chapter suggests several policy measures that Bulgaria can take to advance its system evaluation efforts to help achieve national education goals.