Almost 4.6 million students were heading back to school after the summer break. Starting the new 2019/2020 school year were children in some 24,000 schools nationwide, state news agency PAP reported.
In a special message for the first day of classes, President Andrzej Duda and First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda said that school is a place that inspires students to explore the world and learn things about other people.
School is also a place where one can feel part of a community and build new friendships, the presidential couple said in their message.
First-day-of-school message from the Polish first couple. Image by Eliza Radzikowska-Białobrzewska/KPRP
When the summer break was starting in June, the country’s education minister, Dariusz Piontkowski, said the government would allocate PLN 1.5 billion (EUR 340 million, USD 380 million) to help students purchase supplies for the next school year.
Poland's conservative government offers parents a handout of PLN 300 for every child under the age of 18 before the start of each school year to help finance the purchase of school supplies under its Good Start programme.
Poland in 2017 went ahead with education reform to phase out a previous system of six-year primary school, three-year middle school and three-year high school and replace it with an earlier system of eight years of primary school and four years of high school or five years of vocational training.
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Source: IAR