Young Teachers in the Kielce region (Poland)

 

The recent report by Zuzanna Zbróg and Agnieszka Szplit, Professional Needs of Beginning Teachers: The Perspective of Kielce Teachers from Primary and Secondary Schools with up to Five Years of Experience (2025), offers an important contribution to the debate on the crisis of the teaching profession in Poland. Although the study is regionally situated, its diagnostic value extends far beyond the Kielce region. It may be read as a case study of the broader Polish conditions under which young teachers enter, experience, and often consider leaving the profession.

The report is particularly valuable because it shifts attention from abstract international indicators to the lived institutional reality of schools. Large-scale international surveys, including those commissioned or co-financed within global policy frameworks, tend to describe education through the language of performance, human capital, efficiency, measurable competencies, and system management. Such studies may be useful for comparative governance, but they rarely capture the pedagogical, relational, and existential conditions of becoming a teacher in a concrete school environment.

Zbróg and Szplit’s report is different. It asks not only whether young teachers stay or leave, but what happens to them during the transition from university preparation to full professional responsibility. The authors define beginning teachers as those with up to five years of experience and examine their needs through a mixed-methods design: a survey of 176 female teachers and focus group interviews with 31 participants. The theoretical framework combines Ryan and Deci’s Basic Psychological Needs Theory — autonomy, relatedness, and competence — with Tomasz Kocowski’s Polish theory of social needs.

The key finding is that beginning teachers do not merely suffer from low salaries, although remuneration remains a major demotivating factor. More profoundly, they experience frustration of basic professional needs. They need to feel competent in classroom work, supported in dealing with pupils, parents, and school procedures. They need relatedness — genuine professional belonging, not only polite inclusion in the staffroom. They need autonomy — the possibility of developing their own teaching style, making meaningful decisions, and preserving a sense of professional agency.

One of the most important categories introduced in the report is the “third-year crisis”. The authors show that frustration of professional needs intensifies around the third year of work, especially under the pressure of the career advancement procedure. This challenges the common assumption that the first year is the only critical point of induction. In the Polish context, the crisis may appear later, when initial enthusiasm gives way to bureaucratic pressure, institutional dependency, and confrontation with the real culture of school work.

The report also reveals the dysfunction of formal mentoring. Mentoring is often presented in policy discourse as evidence of support for young teachers. Yet Zbróg and Szplit show that when mentoring combines supportive and evaluative functions, it may become part of the control system rather than a developmental relationship. Informal collegial support is often perceived as more valuable than formal mentoring. This distinction is crucial: a system may be able to demonstrate that a mentor has been assigned, while the young teacher may still remain unsupported in any meaningful professional sense.

Another important concept is “apparent integration”. Beginning teachers may declare that they are integrated into the school community, but this integration may be superficial. Courtesy, kindness, or social acceptance do not necessarily translate into professional support, protection, feedback, or real inclusion in decision-making. The report therefore distinguishes between social politeness and genuine professional belonging.

Particularly alarming is the role of exclusion, ostracism, and mobbing as predictors of the intention to leave the profession. The report points to experiences such as denial of professional identity, blocking of initiatives, lack of institutional protection, and intergenerational reproduction of toxic workplace cultures. This is a major contribution to the debate: young teachers do not necessarily leave because they are “not resilient enough”. They may leave because the school as a workplace fails to recognize, protect, and develop them as professionals.

The Kielce report also exposes the internalization of overload. Beginning teachers often normalize excessive workload as a natural feature of the profession or interpret their inability to cope as a personal failure. This is pedagogically and ethically significant. It shows how the ideology of “vocation” may become a mechanism that transfers responsibility from the institution to the individual.

For international researchers, the report is important because it reminds us that the teacher shortage crisis cannot be understood only through macroeconomic or comparative indicators. The key question is not merely how many teachers enter or leave the profession, but what kind of professional world they encounter when they enter school.

The Polish case demonstrates that retention depends not only on salaries, recruitment systems, or formal induction programmes, but also on the culture of work inside schools: leadership, collegiality, autonomy, feedback, protection against humiliation, and the possibility of building a coherent professional identity.

In this sense, the report by Zbróg and Szplit is more than a local study. It is a pedagogical diagnosis of how a system may lose young teachers before they formally resign — by depriving them of voice, agency, belonging, and trust.

A concise concluding thesis might be:

International indicators show where a country stands in comparative tables; pedagogical research shows what happens to a human being who enters school and tries to become a teacher. The Kielce report belongs to the second category — and that is precisely why it is so important.

(transl. ChATGPT-AI)