Education and new challenges - Raport Polska 2030

Education and new challenges
case of secondary schools with the best teaching results, where the percentage of
young people from families with the highest status reaches 60%) is accompanied
by the heterogenisation and egalitarianism of the social composition of vocational
schools (Table 4.2). It is also probably consequence of better education of parents and
the changes in young people’s school preferences (some of them are oriented towards
vocational schools), nevertheless what matters here are not the reasons, but the consequences
of the described phenomena. They cause polarisation of schools, and at
the same time enhance the quality of the social world in each of them. They differentiate
life chances of young people, but make them better than over the last decades.
Table 4.2. Changes in the social composition of upper-secondary students
Educational status of parents School type Total
Secondary general
schools
Secondary technical/specialised
schools
Basic vocational
schools
2003 2009 2003 2009 2003 2009 2003 2009
Low 3.3 1.7 10.8 6.1 22.0 10.1 7.3 3.9
Below-medium 14.9 9.2 31.9 24.7 40.9 34.9 22.9 16.6
Medium 55.6 48.4 52.4 59.4 34.1 47.9 52.7 51.9
High 26.2 40.7 4.9 9.7 2.9 7.2 17.2 27.5
TOTAL 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0
Source: 2003 and 2009 Toruń survey 33 , preparation by P. Mikiewicz.
Today, there are at one end very good secondary general schools, preparing
new elites, educating very ambitious and demanding young people, and at the
other end – vocational schools which only assemble “unnecessary” people, coming
from the poorest environments, but also representatives of the social centre, which
essentially change the image of schools. This process has positive and negative aspects.
The positive aspects include the transformation of the social composition of
vocational schools, where such transformations should force the change of their image
– as schools that are good, but “in a different way”. The negative aspects include
segmentation and non-openness of secondary general schools: the better, the more
inaccessible to young people from families which do not belong to intelligentsia.
This indicates that the mechanisms of identifying talents, which require greater
effort and more work from teachers, are quite weak in Polish schools. School careers
depend much more on the status of the family of origin, school itself has little impact.
It is certainly much less significant than in the developed European countries, where
parents’ education does not determine to such an extent the school career and life
chances of young people. Great Britain can be used as an example here (Fig. 4.24b).
Although educational achievements of children from families with low status are as
frequent as in Polish families (similar percentage of young people achieves university
education), the careers of young people from families with medium, and especially
with low status, are very different. In Poland the percentage of young people from
33 Survey based on the complete population of all upper-secondary schools in Toruń in 2003 (N = 4069)
and 2009 (N = 3019).
113