A special educator can participate in all the activities of the school counselling service and is most effective in those related to the organisation of the lives of children with special needs. The authors monitored the cooperation between special educators and school management, as part of a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews, in the context of which the special educator’s tasks are defined in the Programme Guidelines for Primary School Counselling Service (2008), as well as how they cooperate with school management in terms of how many other tasks they perform together. The authors found that special educators enjoy the trust of management. The results revealed the operation areas of the school counselling service wherein cooperation between the special educator and school management was evident.The results of the study suggest the basis for further scientific research on the cooperation between school management and the school counselling service.

The quality of educational work is inextricably linked to many factors at the system, school, teacher, and student levels. This research was carried out within the project ‘Education of Teachers as a Factor of Providing High-quality Life-long Learning in the Learning Society/The Society of Fast Socio-economic Changes and Unsure Future’, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency. This paper provides a basic overview of the characteristics of open instruction, an umbrella term that combines active and learner-centred didactic strategies. The empirical section focuses on the use of didactic strategies. The survey was carried out with 1,536 primary school[1] pupils in Grades 7 and 9 and 263 of their teachers. Both pupils and teachers cited problem-based learning and research-based learning as the most commonly used didactic strategies, while project-based learning was the least frequently used. Despite the agreement on the most and least frequently used didactic strategies, there are statistically significant differences between pupils’ and teachers’ perceptions of all selected didactic strategies. Teachers reported that they used these strategies more often than was perceived by their pupils. We also found a statistically significant impact of better learning performance on the perception of certain didactic strategies. The results of the study raise new research questions, especially in the design of more detailed analyses of the use of didactic strategies in pedagogical practice.   [1] Slovenian basic education lasts nine years. Students enter primary school at the age of 6 and complete it at the age of 15.