As in other countries of the Eastern bloc, Poland’s VET regressed with the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy after 1989 (cf. Adamski et al. 1993; Parks ed. 1998). As large state-owned enterprises were closed, so were the vocational schools functioning alongside them; they were not replaced with new schools. This is was due, on one hand, to insufficient funds (low expenditures for VET), and on the other hand, to the popular belief at the time that vocational education was too expensive and held no future for Poland’s economic development. However, after years of inattention, VET has been regaining a strong position in national policies since 2007 (Dębowski & Stechly, 2015). This has partly been explained by changes in the labour market associated with the opening of European labour markets, which prompted an increase in national demand for workers with qualifications in skilled occupations and recently due to large scale emigration and immigration. The heightened focus on VET has been supported by EU educational policies and funding since VET has a central role within EU strategies for competitiveness and social inclusion. Employers have also pushed central and local governments in this direction. The Polish VET system is organised in schools. However, strengthened linkages to employers are part of recent VET reforms aimed at increasing the relevance of VET to labour market needs, strengthening the quality of interactions between the actors from the education and labour market systems and ensuring a correspondence between skills supply and demand (Bolli et al., 2018). Nevertheless, Poland can be still regarded as a statist VET regime, as characterized by Busemeyer and Trampush (2012, 12), which obtains high commitment to VET from the public sector but implies relatively low employer involvement.

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