EDUCATION AND ECONOMY
by Jack Karczewski
Managing
Director LMS Poland
The author has held leading posts in educational
organisations and State-education governing
bodies.
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The changes that came about in 1989 reached
far deeper into every aspect of Polish life than
many people think. The new political and
economic system brought about a situation where
every plan of the state economy and administration
had to be reviewed to be in tune with the changes.
Included in this revision was the educational
system, not least because of its role in shaping the
next generation, the size of the teachers' work-
force, and the cost to the State of schooling. From
the start, there have been many groups interested
in the way the schooling system changes,
however, they have not always opted for the same
solutions and targets.
The first and probably most important group is
the business community, which takes in both
secondary school leavers and university
graduates. As the face of the economy has
changed, with the number of Polish private
businesses as well as foreign enterprises growing,
so has pressure grown on the educational system
to be more responsive to the needs of the
workplace. Employers who in the first years after
1989 overlooked the educational deficiencies of
potential employees, settling often for mere
enthusiasm, nowadays are stiff in setting
qualification requirements. The basic expec-
tations today are at least one Western language
and basic knowledge in such matters as sales,
marketing, advertising, PR, HR or IT.
The response to those needs came from many
sides. One of the biggest moves was made within
the state system. It concerned moving from
Russian to English as the basic foreign language
taught in schools at all levels. To this end a
national network of Language Teacher Training
Colleges was set-up, with the biggest help
coming from the British Government, with a
3-year Bachelor-degree-level programme. As an
additional measure a programme of retraining
teachers of other subjects (mostly of Russian)
was introduced, with certain pressure applied by
trade unions afraid of perspective unemployment.
To coincide with this, new State examination
standards were set, with the Cambridge FCE
becoming the official English language test.
In relation to business subjects, a widely copied
move was the creation of MBA and similar
programmes at all of Poland's largest universities,
even those that previously had little to do with
this field. An extra incentive being the fact that
a11 these courses are paid for, at least in part, by
the students. With the costs of living and other
resources constantly growing, the age of free
higher education has gone for good, forcing many
students to move over to non-resident programmes and take-up a full-time job.
However the state educational system could not
possibly cope with the problems it faced. This
opened the way to something totally new to Poland,
private training institutions. Most visible are the
private universities and post-secondary schools, that
offer business related teaching programmes and
diplomas. Although seemingly the underdogs, they
have grown steadily and now compete on an equal
basis with state schools, for Poland's best (and most
aftluent) students. The coming years will show
which graduates will be better suited for obtaining
attractive posts and moving up the corporate ladder.
In the shadow of normal education, came the
problem of training employees of both Polish and
foreign companies, as well as retraining the
jobless to give them a chance
of getting employment. The
state schools, could offer little
or nothing. In the wake of this
need, came a mass of training
organisations offering courses
in any subject one could
name, a lot of them operating
as branches of international
training companies offering
highly specialised courses.
The second group to have its
word in the way education
has gone in Poland, are its
clients i.e., parents and their
offspring. The growing middle class, made up mostly of
private business people and
company executives, as they
has experienced improvements in other areas of their
lives (e.g., food and clothing,
homes and cars, leisure)
they expected an improve-
ment in the way their chil-
dren were taught. They also understood that one
could not expect much from under-funded State
schools, with 35-pupil classes and poorly paid
teachers. So came the private kindergartens,
primary and secondary schools. The government
quickly understood that private schools were not
only the whim of well-to-do parents, but could
also relieve state budget pressure. In return
limited tax relief was introduced. Even schools
originally created for diplomats' children were
involved, accepting not only expatriates'
youngsters but also Poles.
In recent years the Government has had trouble
in financing all the educational needs of
Poland's young. The administrative jungle has
often led to a squandering of funds. To remedy
this, it was decided to share the problem with
others, by transferring responsibility for primary
and secondary schools to local authorities. This
enabled rich and well governed counties to
improve their schools. Secondly, the green light
was given to headmasters to try fundraising, e.g.,
by letting the premises or organising
extracurricular courses.
A new measure that is planned both to spread
evenly the limited. resources and to promote
better teacher quality, is the coupon system in
which each child is appropriated a sum of money
equivalent to that spent on him from the State
budget and this sum will then be transfemed to the
school of the student's choosing. However this
idea has a lot of opponents, including teachers'
unions, fearing that some schools would have to
close down because of reasons such as bad
location. This has already happened to the
majority of vocational schools which previously
operated in tandem with big factories which
subsequently went bankrupt.
The changes in the economic system in Poland
have come a long way. During the last seven
years most Poles have come to grips with the
realities of life in a market economy. For many
weak state enterprises the solution has been their
privatisation. Yet, less than 5 percent of the
population would accept total privatisation of the
education system, as opposed to double this
figure for privatisation of the health service.
