The paper addresses the school policy reforms in Slovenia and Croatia as an interplay of post-socialist transformation and Europeanization from a comparative perspective. More specifically, it focuses on the school policy and reform patterns in Slovenia and Croatia, by exploring their common roots, during the socialist era and the diverging development paths, since the 1990s. General development trends are identified and analysed, by exploring the influences of neoliberal and transnational approaches, with a particular focus on international large-scale student assessments (ILSAs) and their role in shaping national policies. Particular national issues are further explored, including the policy-borrowing and policy-lending patterns, their underlying political/ideological drivers and other issues where the two countries diverge from the transnational patterns. The paper is guided by the following research question: ‘How are the specific features of the development of the Slovenian and Croatian (post-socialist) systems reflected in the Europeanisation/internationalization of the Slovenian and Croatian educational space?’. The conceptual/theoretical framework is based on post-socialist transformation theories (e.g. Chankseliani & Silova, 2018; Halász, 2015), EU and transnational educational governance (Alexiadou, 2014; Hultqvist et al., 2018) and policy learning in education (e.g. Steiner-Khamsi & Waldow, 2012). A comparative analysis is based on a thorough review of the relevant literature and secondary sources, an analysis of formal documents and legal sources at the EU and national level (e.g. qualitative evaluation of the European Education & Training framework and national strategic policy documents) and a review of the ILSAs data. In the paper, we develop a critical perspective on the motives and timing of Slovenian and Croatian education policy-making by referring to the reform initiatives and their impact; joining/withdrawing from some cycles of ILSA and comparative studies; bilateral/regional cooperation efforts. Therefore, we show that policy-making in education is not only about modernization and reform processes, but that it is tightly coupled with the ideological presumptions and preferences, adopted by the political actors. Especially in the case of Croatia, Europeanisation is often used as a general argument for the formal adoption of ambitious education reform agenda(s), which are rarely fully implemented.

*Alexiadou, N. (2014). Policy learning and Europeanisation in education: the governance of a field and the transfer of knowledge. In A. Nordin & D. Sundberg (Eds.), Transnational policy flows in European education: the making and governing of knowledge in the education policy field (pp. 123–140). Oxford: Symposium Books. *Chankseliani, M., & Silova, I. (Eds.). (2018). Comparing Post-Socialist Transformations purposes, policies, and practices in education. Oxford: Symposium Books. *Halász, G. (2015). Education and Social Transformation in Central and Eastern Europe. European Journal of Education, 50(3), 350–371. *Hultqvist, E., Lindblad, S., & Popkewitz, T. S. (Eds.) (2018). Critical Analyses of Educational Reforms in an Era of Transnational Governance. Cham: Springer. *Steiner-Khamsi, G., & F. Waldow (Eds.) (2012). Policy borrowing and lending in education. London: Routledge.