In the Croatian educational system in the 1990s, religious education of all confessions became a part of the Croatian school curriculum, where education legislative permits confessional religious education in preschool, primary and secondary education, as an elective subject. Some studies indicate that around 87% of primary and 80% of secondary school students take the course every school year (Razum, 2009).

Religious education teachers, like all other schools teachers, have a significant and influential role in achieving their subjects’ curriculum goals and objectives (Darling-Hammond, 2012). Teachers' professional formation, which takes place at theological university departments and theological institutes, should provide them with theoretical knowledge and the needed teaching competence and expertise. Furthermore, Catholic education teachers in daily school work should implement theologically-based teaching and, provide their students with a genuine religious experience (Hackett, 2009; Pépin, 2009).

The question to what extent the completed formal teacher education programs prepares the teachers for the challenging school environme nt is always an intriguing one (Darling-Hammond, 2006) and the present study deals with some of them. The main aim of the present study was to examine the quality of religious education in Croatian primary schools when assessed from teachers’ perspective, where we want to explore how teachers perceive impact of different factors on the existing quality of religious education in primary schools, how satisfied they are as religious education teachers in current Croatian educational system and which expectations they have about religious education in future. In addition, the import aim of the present study is to identify possible latent dimensions of teachers’ opinions, expectations and satisfaction and to test their interrelatedness and stability.

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