| Abstract: | Like many of the countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland is currently in the throes of a major educational reform. The systems of primary and secondary schooling have been restructured, much of the responsibility for education is in the process of decentralisation, new curricula are being introduced into schools and a new school leaving certificate, the Nowa Matura, is to be implemented, along with a new examination infrastructure. A national monitoring programme could play a crucially important role in this context, providing a useful tool for medium to long-term evaluation of the effects of the reform in terms of pupil achievement. To this end, and within the support framework of the EU SMART initiative, pilot pupil performance surveys were carried out on a national scale in Poland in both the primary and secondary sectors. This paper outlines some of the main features of the reform, considers the potential value of a national monitoring programme for reform evaluation, offers some salient results from the pilot monitoring surveys and highlights some important implications of the experience for future programme design and use. |
