In the previous school year, 237,000 foreign students were enrolled in Polish schools, the vast majority of them children from Ukraine, according to last year’s report by the Centrum Edukacji Obywatelskiej (Centre for Citizenship Education, CEO) and the International Rescue Committee. Despite the efforts of teachers and local governments, the education system is still not fully prepared to operate in a multicultural environment. The greatest challenge is the shortage of specialists capable of identifying the emotional, linguistic, and educational needs of children with migration experience.
In the 2024/2025 school year, foreign nationals accounted for 5.3% of all participants in the Polish education system—around 353,000 people—with 237,000 of them enrolled in schools for children and adolescents (representing 4.8% of all pupils). Ukrainian students are now present in every third classroom in Poland, numbering 203,000 in total. Foreign students attend 67% of all schools, or about 14,100 institutions, meaning that more than 4 million Polish students may have daily contact with cultural diversity.
“Very often, the first barrier preventing children from functioning well in Polish schools is simply relationships. We live in a society with divided views on migration, so not everyone treats these children kindly or with acceptance. This is a major problem for people operating within the Polish school system—both children and parents,”
says Agnieszka Kosowicz from the Polish Migration Forum (Polskie Forum Migracyjne), speaking to the Newseria news agency.
Although schools have gained substantial experience working with children from Ukraine, they still lack sufficient resources, tools, and specialists to build a friendly, multicultural learning environment. Persistent problems include shortages of intercultural assistants and translators, as well as insufficient psychological support for students with migration backgrounds.
“A very serious issue in Polish schools right now is the high level of anxiety and the difficulty of building relationships between Polish and foreign children. We certainly face challenges related to teachers’ resources and skills for working in intercultural groups. As a country, we have significant experience working with Ukrainian children since the outbreak of the full-scale war, but we still lack concrete tools, skills, and resources for teachers to work effectively in classrooms where children do not understand one another and to create a positive learning atmosphere,”
explains Agnieszka Kosowicz.
Many schools are also struggling with the emotional difficulties of students who arrived in Poland as a result of war or other traumatic experiences. Experts point to a shortage of psychologists and educational counselors trained to work with children in crisis, as well as a lack of procedures for diagnosing their needs. The CEO report “Students from Ukraine in Polish Schools – School Year 2023/2024” showed that teachers continued to feel helpless when dealing with trauma and other specific emotional problems experienced by refugee students. A similar sense of helplessness was reported by school psychologists. This is compounded by a cultural reluctance among Ukrainian students—and their parents—to seek specialist support.
“These children often arrive here after extremely difficult, traumatic experiences—war or violence—and we still need much more capacity to properly diagnose their needs and respond to their difficulties, including emotional issues and trauma,”
the expert emphasizes.
As she adds, improving the situation requires cooperation among multiple stakeholders—schools, local governments, non-governmental organizations, and central authorities. Only such collaboration can create a sustainable integration system that does not rely solely on short-term projects.
“For this environment to become truly inclusive, we need cooperation among parents, students, teachers, school staff, various experts such as psychological and educational counseling centers, as well as NGOs and local and central authorities—because all of them shape this environment. Above all, we need joint action built on respect,”
says Agnieszka Kosowicz.
The CEO report shows that despite growing experience, integration still faces institutional and competency barriers. Long-term training programs are needed, along with the inclusion of intercultural education in the training of future teachers. Currently, schools more often pursue assimilation-oriented rather than integration-oriented approaches. The most common scenario is the parallel functioning of two separate student communities. There is little visible willingness to integrate among both Polish and Ukrainian students. This separation is reinforced by the larger number of Ukrainian students in some schools, a lack of school-led integration initiatives, and low levels of teacher competence in multicultural education.
“Teacher training is absolutely essential, because Poland has become a culturally diverse country only relatively recently. This is an experience of the last few years, and teachers often lack the skills to work in such an environment. They do not know how to support a child who does not speak Polish, cannot write, or cannot read the required literature. We need to build these competencies not only among current teachers, but also among those who aspire to become teachers,”
says the representative of the Polish Migration Forum.
In many psychological and educational counseling centers, there are still no experts prepared to work with students from other countries, nor tools adapted to cultural and linguistic differences. Diagnosing educational or emotional difficulties in such children requires new competencies—both linguistic and intercultural—which remain in short supply within the Polish education system.
“Until recently, we did not have such needs, but now this is a very real challenge—how to diagnose a child who has arrived from India, Colombia, Belarus, or Ukraine; whether they have dyslexia or ADHD; whether they need special support; and how to distinguish the effects of trauma from developmental disorders. These skills are far more necessary now than ever before, and we urgently need specialists,”
concludes Agnieszka Kosowicz.
