Slovenia has two ministries with responsibility for education: the Ministry of Education and Sport, which is in charge of pre-school, basic and secondary education, and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology, which is in charge of tertiary education.

At the level of primary education, visual arts and music are traditionally part of the school curriculum, but the integration of lessons about theatre, dance, film, video arts, media and cultural heritage is left mostly to teachers’ own initiative or integrated in media studies. Visits to cultural institutions are encouraged and conducted on so-called ‘Cultural Days’.

At the level of secondary education, the situation is more complex: art education is a compulsory part of the curriculum only in the general education school (gimnazija or ‘grammar school’), where greater emphasis can also be placed on cultural education within the scope of Slovene and foreign language learning, literature, history, geography, sociology and ethics. In technical and vocational education the compulsory subjects and their number vary according to the type of courses. However, pupils in all types of schools are able to select a certain number of optional extra-curricular activities, including a wide array of cultural and arts subjects. One of the most significant developments of recent years in the Slovene secondary education sector has been the introduction of Arts Grammar School (umetniška gimnazija) programmes within certain Grammar Schools around Slovenia - in Ljubljana (3), Maribor, Koper-Capodistria, Nova Gorica, Velenje and Celje. These Arts Grammar Schools specialise in one or two different art disciplines, namely music, dance, drama/theatre or visual arts (see also the following sections about education in individual art disciplines).

Slovenia also has a dense national network of secondary-level music schools, all of which are grouped together under the Association of Slovene Music Schools - see Music and dance education.

While primary- and secondary-level arts education has always been well provided for at regional level, tertiary arts education in Slovenia has remained largely centralised within institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, the Academy of Music and the Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television (AGRFT), all of which are part of the University of Ljubljana. A noteworthy exception is provided by the tertiary arts education programmes of the Faculty of Education within the University of Maribor.

Architectural studies have been conducted in Ljubljana since the 1920s and are now offered within the Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana. In Autumn 2007, following curriculum development in accordance with the Bologna Reform, the first 60 students enrolled on the interdisciplinary architecture programme within the Faculty of Civil Engineering at the University of Maribor.

A number of other cultural programmes - Library Science, Comparative Literature, History of Art, Musicology, Sociology of Culture - are also run within the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Fashion and Textile Design are offered by the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Engineering, University of Ljubljana.

The younger Slovene universities are attempting to extend their scope of their activities into areas which are not currently provided for - Cultural Heritage Management can now be studied at the University of Nova Gorica and Art History at the University of Primorska, while Art History will in future also be available at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor. Some years ago the latter also introduced a postgraduate studies programme in the Culture, Philosophy and Education of Central Europe. Even younger are the postgraduate joint programmes in Intercultural Studies: Comparative Studies of Ideas and Cultures of the Scientific Research Centre (ZRC SAZU), Slovene Academy of Science and Arts and the University of Nova Gorica. A postgraduate programme in Historical Anthropology of Art Practices is also taught at the private Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH).

In the realm of tertiary education there are still no specialised undergraduate or postgraduate programmes for important cultural professions such as puppeteers, curators, producers and arts and heritage managers. Education for those professions is currently provided through special courses, seminars, workshops and additional education abroad, as well as through the work of various non-institutional training organisations. In some cases young people go to take undergraduate studies abroad, to the Czech Republic (film production and puppetry at FAMU, Prague), to Austria (cultural management in Salzburg), or further afield. Understandably, specialisations and Masters studies programmes abroad are becoming more and more common (eg Architectural Association in London) and are facilitated through an increasing number of stipends (eg the Fulbright Program or the Chevening and Valvasor-Chevening Scholarships which help fill the gap in cultural management education.

Each year the Ministry of Culture announces open calls for scholarships for postgraduate study abroad by individuals in different fields of audiovisual culture (music, intermedia, performance, visual, architecture, design, architecture and publishing) and cultural management. In 2005 the Ministry provided € 700,883 of financial support for the scholarships covering the school fees of 120 students (source: ERICarts). Support for undergraduate studies abroad is only offered when no similar undergraduate programme is available in Slovenia.

Arts education is one of the priorities of the National Programme for Culture and is defined as 'creative education and education for creativity'. Special attention is placed on the cultural content in pre-elementary (nursery, kindergarten), primary and secondary school curricula and in the teaching programmes of cultural institutions. One of the main goals is to link cultural and educational sub-systems and to re-establish mechanisms for a systematic and organised network of both. To this end, in 2006, the Minister of Culture and the Minister of Education announced that the school year 2006-2007 was to be a Year of Culture. Kindergartens and elementary and secondary schools were invited to focus on cultural education and build the special programmes of cultural institutions into their regular activities. The Ministry of Culture also continued with the programme Growing with the Book, whereby every pupil in the seventh year of primary school receives one literature book.

In addition to the scholarship programme, there has also been a special budget line at the Ministry of Culture since 2004 entitled Vocational Training in the Field of Culture. This includes financial support for private non-governmental non-profit cultural organisations that exercise continuous educational programmes and/or enable participation on seminars, meetings and workshops home and abroad or are members of networks that provide additional occupational training (ie cultural management).

With its innate flexibility, the NGO sector offers 'natural' solutions to several general issues in cultural policy (regionalisation and decentralisation) and is much more efficient in getting international partners and co-funding for its projects. The same can be claimed for educational programmes: 'missing links' in formal arts education have been addressed by numerous private cultural NGOs whose main activity is running programmes of art production and promotion, and for whom education is a supplementary activity. Such educational programmes are diverse and viable, yet the NGOs which offer them are still fighting for recognition and inclusion in official cultural education programmes.

See also various NGO training programmes focusing on individual art disciplines in the following sections.