Since 2004 there has been a considerable outflow of Poles to countries that opened their labour markets, e.g., United Kingdom and Iceland. Along came their children who needed to adapt to the foreign environment and education system. Polish complementary schools have played an important, though ambivalent, role in this process. Previous research shows that complementary schools reproduce national identities through language teaching, but comparative qualitative studies in this field are rare. Through 7 focus group interviews with students of Polish complementary schools aged 9-18 in Reykjavik and one city in England, we gathered material showing common threads of both schools and differences in their structure, role, origin and the students' motivations to participate. The Saturday schools are considered by Polish students to be less demanding than schools in Poland but more demanding than Icelandic/English mainstream schools, which many rate as not satisfactory for their academic development. A tension between a need for freedom and high expectations for the academic outcome of education influences not only students' opinions about schooling, but also about the host society. In both studies the level of mathematics education serves as a marker of difference between “us” and “them”.