Invisible schooling: The Independence Ukrainian School case and the paradoxes of forced migration in Poland

Abstract

This article examines the Independence Ukrainian School, a refugee-led educational initiative established in Poland after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Created by displaced Ukrainian teachers to ensure educational continuity through the Ukrainian curriculum, the school initially operated outside the Polish education system and remained institutionally invisible. Based on a qualitative single-case study, including 22 in-depth interviews with teachers and the school’s headteacher as well as document analysis, the article explores how educational invisibility can function both as a protective community strategy and as a mechanism of institutional exclusion. The analysis conceptualises visibility as administrative legibility within the host country’s legal and educational order, using governance analysis and the perspective of street-level bureaucracy. It identifies three interconnected dimensions of (in)visibility: the institutional visibility of the school, the professional visibility of displaced teachers, and the administrative visibility of students. The findings show that invisibility initially enabled rapid self-organisation, cultural continuity and emotional safety, but later restricted access to funding, recognition, welfare-related rights, and stable educational trajectories. The article argues for more flexible education and migration policies capable of recognising, collaborating with, and institutionally supporting migrant-led educational initiatives without reducing them to assimilationist models of inclusion.