Opening a Preschool in Poland (Krakow)

Happy new year all!
My wife and I have an ambition to open a preschool in Poland. We both have education with children but unfortunately not the correct pedagogical polish education.

We are seeking advice, assistance and also a wonderful headteacher to open our preschool.

We are due to get approval from the fire department, and Sanepid soon so our only barrier is the education ministry and curriculum, unfortunately, we don't have enough information on this aspect.

So the question is - How do you acquire approval and funding from the educational ministry in Poland. Particularly if the Director of the preschool doesn't have the appropriate qualifications?

Thank you!!

EDIT: Just realized this may be the wrong forum I guess it should be Law? Sorry admins!

The best thing is to get an experienced headteacher to handle all of this for you. You can represent the kindergarten as the owners, while the headteacher can be there for paperwork purposes. It's really not a good idea to try and open one without such a person if you don't have experience in PL, as the subsidies can be withdrawn for the slightest mistake.

They are, incidentally, funded by local/provincial governments, not by national governments.

What you can do is hire someone on a 20/20 basis - 20 hours a week handling headteacher duties (i.e. admin), 20 hours a week teaching. There's really not many opportunities for ambitious preschool teachers, so you should have no problems recruiting someone capable.

Yes, but how can they find one if they haven`t got personal connections?

Placing an ad on the site of the local Education board would be a good idea. Also, ads on other sites.

kuratorium.krakow.pl/praca-dla-nauczycieli/

Thanks a lot for the suggestions, yes we do not expect it to be too hard to find a good headteacher mostly because we truly want to pay our teachers well and our headteacher will be vital to our business.

The issue I find however is that many teachers are unsure about the process themselves. There are none who are experienced in opening a preschool who don't work for said preschool.

I guess it's going to be a leap of faith we just got Sanepid approval and the fire department should be done next week. Apparently these are the hardest parts...


Is this correct? I thought the national government provides the local government the funds based upon the number of preschools in the area.

its a strange situation in our case as we are in Gimina Mogliany - which has a terrible reputation as well as corruption scandals but in terms of Sanepid and fire department we're attached to Krakow.

As far as I'm aware they cannot refuse us funding.

Yes, but for the maintanance of schools, not preschools aka kindergartens which are solely maintained by local councils.


If all initial requirements are fulfilled, then they can`t. But if they find any faults later on, they can withdraw it.

No, they are entirely dependent on local and occasionally provincial governments. The funding situation depends very much on whether they've got the finances, as there were plenty of documented cases this year where privately run kindergartens no longer received the educational subsidies.

Have you spoken to the person responsible for education in the Gmina to ensure that you'll get the funding? This is Poland - it may well be that you'll be expected to give the director's job to a certain person in exchange for the funding, especially if you're already aware of problems with corruption there. It won't be official, but you can expect strong hints that they would prefer to see a certain person in charge.

I'd also verify that the funding is already in place for other private kindergartens - if you will be the first one, then they may simply refuse to subsidise it in any way.

If you want, I'm happy to have a chat with you about this in detail.

To give you an idea - DGP (one of the most reliable newspapers in Poland) published this article last year - serwisy.gazetaprawna.pl/samorzad/artykuly/1451502,przedszkola-walcza-o-dotacje-w-sadach.html - there's a total of 17 *billion* PLN in claims against local governments from the operators of private kindergartens.