Approximately 192.5 thousand refugee pupils attend Polish kindergartens and schools. More than 17.8 thousand Ukrainian pupils are enrolled in educational facilities in Warsaw. This is the largest number in the country, accounting for more than 9 % of all refugee pupils in the whole of Poland.

This is followed by the voivodeship capitals of Wrocław (7.9 thousand), Kraków (7.2 thousand) and Poznań (6.3 thousand). About one third of Ukrainian pupils enrolled in Polish schools after the Russian aggression are registered in the ten district cities with the highest number of Ukrainian pupils.

“To better illustrate the situation, it is also worth using a relative indicator. Such an indicator would be, for example, the number of Ukrainian pupils per 1,000 inhabitants of a given district between the ages of 3 and 18. The first three places are occupied by: Sopot (approximately 108 Ukrainian pupils per 1,000 inhabitants aged 3-18), Legnica (98) and Wrocław (90), according to a report by the Polish Economic Institute on the settlement of refugees from Ukraine.

Of the 20 districts with the highest value of this indicator, 19 are district-cities and towns. Thus, also in this relative dimension, one can see a significant spatial concentration in large urban centres. Outside cities and their functional areas, one notices a higher share of Ukrainian pupils in the young part of the population in the districts of western Poland and in the central Warsaw-Lodz macro-region.

“If we assume that the figures for Ukrainian students are a better representation of the settlement behaviour of refugees and are an indicator of their intention to stay in Poland for a longer period of time, it is clear that both the potential benefits from the increased population (labour market, consumption) and the resulting higher expenditures on public services will be strongly concentrated in the largest cities in the long term”, estimate the authors of the report.

Arkadiusz Słomczyński