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December 17, 2025
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December 19, 2025
Published
December 31, 2025
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Abstract

This article critically examines current models of bilingual education in Poland, exploring whom they serve and how policy design structures access to such provision. Drawing on empirical research conducted for a recent national report, including systematic analysis of education law, core curricula and examination regulations, the study scrutinizes the present configuration of bilingual education. The article conceptualizes bilingual education as an umbrella category encompassing foreign language bilingual tracks, minority and regional language programmes, Sign Language based Deaf education, and support schemes for learners with migration and refugee backgrounds, situating these within international debates on bilingual education. Two research questions guide the analysis: (1) How do current policy and regulatory frameworks define, classify and organize these models of bilingual education? (2) Who benefits from sustained bilingual learning opportunities, and where do tensions arise between the goal of “bilingual education for all learners” and practices of access, selection, tracking and high stakes assessment? The findings reveal that bilingual education in Poland operates through several parallel legal regimes grounded in distinct logics of excellence, heritage protection and remediation. These regimes function without an overarching legal definition of bilingual education, a cross cutting category of bilingual learner or clearly articulated curricular aims for bilingual competence. While foreign language bilingual tracks are the most codified and resource rich, they remain highly selective. In contrast, minority language, signed language and migrant oriented forms of bilingual or plurilingual education are more fragmented, locally contingent and weakly integrated into assessment frameworks. The article argues that this fragmented design produces a stratified bilingual landscape and proposes principles for a more equitable, plurilingually oriented policy that integrates existing multilingual resources and repositions bilingualism as an integral element of learners’ educational biographies.

Keywords

bilingual education systemic asymetries educational policy plurilingual potentials

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Copyright (c) 2025 Barbara Muszyńska

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How to Cite
Muszyńska, B. (2025). Bilingual Education for Whom? Systemic Asymmetries and Plurilingual Potentials in Poland. INSTED: Interdisciplinary Studies in Education & Society, 27(2(98), 67–86. https://doi.org/10.34862/tce.2025.2.11
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