Is Poland’s Ministry of Education turning schools into instruments of surveillance? A new “functional assessment” system would profile students not only at school, but also within their families and home lives, using centrally managed diagnostic tools. Critics warn this violates parental primacy in education, privacy rights, and data protection—raising fears of state intrusion disguised as support.
At first sight, “functional assessment” sounds harmless: a technocratic term promising better support for pupils, tailored to individual needs. In the official lexicon of the Ministry of National Education, it is framed as a modern diagnostic tool designed to “better understand the student.” In practice, however, the model constitutes one of the most far-reaching interventions in Polish education since the fall of Communism in 1989.
It is built on the biopsychosocial approach and the International Classification of Functioning (ICF), borrowed directly from health care. It assumes that a child’s development is shaped not only by cognitive ability, but by a mesh of psychological traits, social relations and environmental factors. Translated into school reality, this means that pupils are no longer assessed primarily on what they know or how they learn, but on who they are—and where they come from.
Functional assessment operates in two stages. First, schools compile a preliminary profile based on observation, questionnaires and standardised forms. Second, psychological-pedagogical counselling centres combine this material with their own diagnostics to issue binding opinions and recommendations. Ultimately, the system is intended to replace the existing framework governing special educational needs.
A crucial element is already in place. On October 6, 2025, the ministry launched an EU-funded Educational and Specialist Support Portal, administered centrally. Through this platform, school psychologists gain access to tools designed to identify temperament traits, personality competences and so-called “undesirable behavioural patterns.” Reports are generated automatically, complete with charts and interpretative summaries.
The declared aim is benevolent. The implications are not. Functional assessment explicitly includes information about family relations, emotional climate at home, and domestic circumstances. Sensitive data are collected, processed, and stored within a centralised digital system. Critics warn that this replaces dialogue with documentation and trust with surveillance. There is, moreover, a striking legal gap: no statute explicitly obliges parents to submit their children to such assessments, yet counselling centres increasingly expect schools to provide them as a matter of routine.
It is in this context that the Ordo Iuris Institute—a Polish conservative legal think-tank—published a model declaration of parental objection, arguing that the practice violates constitutional principles of parental primacy, family privacy and data protection. As one legal analyst put it, parents—not the state—retain the right to decide whether, how, and for what purpose their child is subjected to psychological diagnosis.
Functional assessment is scheduled to enter into force in 2026. Whether it remains a support tool or evolves into a mechanism of bureaucratic oversight over family life is no longer hypothetical. The infrastructure is already being built.
Long before “functional assessment” appeared in ministerial documents, the direction of travel had been signalled. Under Donald Tusk’s education minister Barbara Nowacka, the ministry advanced one of its most contentious proposals: a new compulsory subject called “health education.”
The label was soothing. The content was not. Draft regulations published in late 2024 proposed to replace the optional subject Education for Family Life with a mandatory course for all pupils. Sexuality was detached from marriage, parenthood, and family context, and redefined as a neutral health issue administered by the state.
Primary-school pupils were to be introduced to “auto-sexual behaviours” as a normative element of puberty, to analyse various “models of family,” and to treat divorce as a standard life event. At later stages, curricula extended to psychosexual orientations, gender identity and “conscious consent” as the sole moral criterion of sexual behaviour. Contraception was discussed extensively; restraint, responsibility and long-term commitment were largely absent.
In secondary schools, the programme widened further. Teachers—rather than parents—were to decide optional modules covering LGBT legal and social issues, sexual pleasure, libido, and multiple forms of sexual activity. Marriage, constitutionally protected as a union of a man and a woman, all but vanished from the framework.
Critics noted the language used in the regulations: teachers were defined as “guides and mentors” responsible for shaping pupils’ values and attitudes. Education was no longer about knowledge, but formation. When the president vetoed legislative changes, key elements resurfaced through executive regulations, accompanied by consultations lasting barely seven days.
Under public pressure, Nowacka eventually announced that health education would be non-compulsory for the 2025 school year. The retreat was explicitly temporary. For opponents, this merely confirmed that the project had been postponed, not abandoned.
Broader transformation of the Polish schools from knowledge to indoctrination was articulated with unusual clarity at the National Education Forum held in Warsaw in January 2026: Poland is witnessing not a reform of education, but a change in its function. The Forum’s concluding declaration stated bluntly that—“without social consent”—a change in the basic aim of the school is taking place. Teaching is giving way to the construction of an “inclusive society” through education. “We declare,” it read, “that the authorities will never obtain consent to use our children for ideological social engineering.”
Education, once ordered around truth and understanding, risks becoming a tool for shaping attitudes and identities. As one refrain put it, the school ‘cannot be a tool of social engineering.’ When it becomes one, learning no longer serves reality, but insulates the young from it.
Following the logic of these reforms to their conclusion reveals that the family is not collateral damage but the principal obstacle. Weakening parental authority becomes a precondition for effective indoctrination; indoctrination, in turn, justifies further encroachment on the family.
Legal counsel Grzegorz Ksepko has argued in a published analysis that an attempt to replace Education for Family Life with compulsory Health Education deliberately de-prioritised the family, in direct conflict with Polish Constitution which states, that: “The family is the primary environment of upbringing—not the state.”
Draft regulations moved intimate matters from the private sphere into mandatory schooling. Parents were reduced to providers of “food, clothing and a warm bed,” while the state claimed authority over identity, values and sexuality. Ksepko described this as the state “entering areas hitherto reserved for the family”. The reforms aimed “to breed a new human being who will belong to the state—and only to the state”.
Seen in context, Poland’s debates look familiar. In France, the EVARS programme—education in “emotional life, relationships, and sexuality”—was thrown into controversy after Médiapart revealed that a state-appointed adviser had previously been convicted for possession of child pornography. The French Union of Families called for the immediate suspension of classes pending systematic vetting. Between 2015 and 2016, some thirty education officials had been convicted of paedophilia-related crimes.
Yet safety was not the only concern. Union president Ludovine de La Rochère warned that the programme “introduces a war of the sexes already in kindergarten,” teaching children that masculinity and femininity are mere social constructs rooted in oppression.
In Britain, sex education has been compulsory since 2020. According to Voice of the Family, even Catholic schools teach about abortion, while headteachers may refuse parental requests for withdrawal. The bishops of England and Wales have publicly “welcomed” the expansion.
Hungary has chosen confrontation. The government of Viktor Orbán has banned the promotion of homosexuality and gender transition to minors, framing the move as child protection. Brussels denounces it as discrimination; Budapest insists on it as defence.
Beyond Europe, Australia debates mandatory anti-misogyny training for boys, after feminist academics and security institutions linked ‘misogyny’ to violent extremism. Once again, the classroom becomes the site of pre-emptive ideological correction.
Across borders, the pattern is unmistakable. The vocabulary changes—health, inclusion, safeguarding—but the strategy remains: redefine norms through compulsory schooling, marginalise parental authority, and present contested ideologies as neutral education. Poland is not inventing a controversy. It is arriving—belatedly—at a crossroads others have already crossed.
[Ed. note: Pavlik Morozov was a Soviet youth portrayed as a Communist ‘hero’ for denouncing his own father to the authorities and then being killed by his family, a story used to encourage children to put ideology above family.]
