The ever-growing need to make arts and culture more accessible to all citizens implies systematic care of public policy and investments into cultural and artistic education, whether it be at the formal, non-formal or informal level. However, public policy priorities and praxis often do not meet these needs and this motivated the Foundation to ask itself what are Croatian cultural policy surroundings in the field of education. Hence, the Foundation initiated the research on cultural and artistic education that it implemented during 2014 and 2015 in cooperation with Ana Žuvela, PhD from the Institute for Development and International Relations. The research also came out of the Foundation’s 2014 – 2017 Strategic Plan in which educational programmes were defined for improving of the field of education in culture. These are programmes that are directed towards developing educational activities for cultural professionals in the civil sector in culture, then towards supporting programmes of creative education for the public that are carried out by CSOs in culture and towards supporting development of an interdisciplinary programme in contemporary arts and culture.

The "Custom Tailored?" study is the result of this two-year research on education in the cultural sector in the Republic of Croatia. The research did not focus on mapping the primary, secondary and higher education in arts and culture, but rather on educational programmes that are implemented or are supported by cultural organizations in the public and civil sector, and which develop and/or additionally upgrade creative skills of the momentary and future audiences or professional capacities of artists and cultural professionals, employed in all organizational activities – creative, governing, financial and administrative. This study presents the finding of the implemented research and it entails a wide array of issues in education and culture, from understanding the role and significance of culture and cultural and artistic education in contemporary society to European policy and good praxis analysis and insight into the Croatian cultural and educational policy systems – two public policies that almost never work together on issues of cultural and artistic education, to praxis in the cultural sector, whether it be professional training possibilities for cultural workers and artists or creative life long education for the public. Thusly, the study considers contextual and conceptual links of the cultural sector with education as well as the convergence of cultural and educational policies, and at the same time, it questions the advantages and the weaknesses of developmental cultural policy in educational praxis and advocates for the significance of artistic and cultural education for sustainable development of the cultural sector.

The author of the study is Ana Žuvela, Dea Vidović is editor, executive editor is Tamara Zamelli, and it was designed by Dario Dević and Hrvoje Živčić.

Keywords: education, culture, arts, civil society, public cultural institutions, cultural sector, cultural policy, educational policy.

The study is disposed under the Creative Commons license Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 Croatia.