The presentation takes point of departure in the fact that Poland in its school and education policies has been increasingly aligning with the other European countries, mostly via transnational collaborations, the OECD and EU. The paper focuses on the analyses of transnational and national education policy documents as well as national education debates and existing studies on policy reform in Poland in the light of the decentralisation of education. The historical complexities and diversity of Polish school policy and reforms are central to the analyses presented. After a series of radical reforms made in the 1990s, a decade of more evolutionary changes followed – a decade in which more emphasis was placed on developing practical solutions within the existing frameworks of the system rather than root and branch revision. But the deeper reform tendencies have not gone away. Consequently, within current school policy and reforms we find tensions relating to changing normative imperatives of political power as these reflect in the process of education in schools. The core of investigation is how national school policy reforms in Poland are framed in transnational collaborations that meet with national particularities and contestations in the context of improving education policy in terms of governance of the education system. Regarding the fact that more decisions are made at school level in Poland than in other OECD countries (OECD 2015), the attention is paid to the complexity of the governance system, and the ways the national system, the regional systems and the local governance structure influence the work of school leaders in the school improvement.

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