Facing the prospects of rapiddemographic aging and decline over the coming decades,Poland needs a highly skilled workforce to help generate theproductivity growth that it needs to fuel continuedconvergence of its living standards with those of its WestEuropean neighbors. Skilling up the workforce starts withequipping youth with the right cognitive and socio-emotionalfoundation skills. International research has identifiedthree dimensions of skills that matter for good employmentoutcomes and economic growth: cognitive skills, such asliteracy, numeracy, and creative and critical thinking orproblem solving; socio-emotional skills and behavioraltraits, such as conscientiousness, grit, and openness toexperience; and job- or occupation-specific technicalskills, such as the ability to work as an engineer. Thisreport focuses on cognitive skills. It examines results forPoland from the program for international student assessment(PISA), which assesses the mathematics, reading, and sciencecompetencies of 15-year-olds. The overall effects of reformon Poland’s PISA scores have been positive, althoughisolating the precise impact of each reform element isdifficult. There is evidence from PISA assessmentsreplicated for older students in upper-secondary educationin 2006, 2009 and 2012 that performance gaps previouslyfound between vocational and general schools for15-year-olds prior to the 1999 reform persist today in uppersecondary education, where the performance of students invocational upper-secondary schools trails that of theirpeers in general education.
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