‘This school year begins absolutely peacefully, despite the fact that the war continues, despite the fact that time is uneasy. The school year begins in the most peaceful way in the last three years’, said Minister of Education and Science Przemysław Czarnek during the nationwide inauguration of the 2023/2024 school year, held at the Kornel Makuszyński School and Education Centre in Węgrów in the Mazowieckie Voivodeship.

Minister Czarnek stressed that the school year had never started on a nationwide scale in a special school. ‘We emphasise the great importance of these schools. Special schools are places with excellent teachers, excellent pupils and excellent parents bringing these pupils, they just need to have the conditions to really learn in decent classrooms and gyms. We finance the construction, expansion, and modernisation of special schools’, said the head of the Ministry of Education and Science, recalling that thanks to government grants of PLN 13.3 million, a school in Węgrów was modernised.

More than a dozen investments are being carried out across Poland to develop the infrastructure of special schools. They include facilities in: Lublin (over PLN 64 million), Kozienice (PLN 20 million), Bystrzyca (over PLN 20.5 million). The value of investments in special education amounts to over PLN 1 billion.

With the start of the new school year, the process of handing over laptops to students of IV classes has also begun.

‘It will take the whole of September and probably a good part of October, but every fourth-grade pupil will receive a laptop on their own. And it will be so every year. Just to serve pupils for the next five years of primary school’, emphasized Minister Czarnek. He also mentioned teachers, who this year will receive a voucher of PLN 2,500 for the purchase of computer equipment, as well as an award to mark the 250th anniversary of the establishment of the National Education Commission.

Adrian Andrzejewski