Poland's details

34 Nicholas Copernicus Primary School (Szkoła Podstawowa nr 34 im. Mikołaja Kopernika) is a six-year primary school for students aged 7 – 13, situated in a southern district of the city of Katowice. The school has now about five hundred students and employs forty teachers. The students learn in twenty-one classes, years one to six.
The school’s general background has changed over the last few years, mirroring the changes happening in the community. Many well-off families with parents having professional jobs have moved away to new residential districts situated further from the city centre. In their place, a lot of families have moved in from the city centre, whose the poorer areas are being gradually rebuilt to give the city a more modernised character. As a result, our school has been recently admitting more and more students coming from malfunctioning familes, with all kinds of problems, such as family violence, child neglect, unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, single parenthood etc. Some of our students are looked after by probation officers. Many students thus need special help from our special needs assistant, the local Pedagogical-Psychological Counselling Centre or Local Social Aid Centre. A lot of them have specific learning problems and special educational needs, some suffer from severe behaviour disorders. Trying to prevent social exclusion of these students in the future, the school is involved in a variety of prophylactic and prevention programmes, whose aim is to stress and reinforce positive behaviour and attitude patterns.
On the other hand, the school has a number of very bright, talented and highly motivated students, who succeed in regional and national competitions and tests, and who are continually encouraged to develop their abilities and interests in all possible ways during extra-curricular activities.
Both these groups of students, as well as the third, largest group of average pupils, are taken good care of by the school teaching staff, who use a wide range of tools to provide them with the best possible assistance. Participating in European projects, such as Comenius or eTwinning, has enabled our students to broaden their knowledge about the world, motivated them to study foreign languages, increased their curiosity of other cultures and given them a chance to become more open, more tolerant and more involved in educational processes. We do hope that this tendency will continue for the benefit of our students and the whole school community.