Educational services in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic

The education crisis in the COVID-19 pandemic has been such a much-discussed media topic in the last two years that it is slowly becoming a platitude. The public opinion focuses on the adaptation, i.e. psychological, technical and organisational problems of students and teachers. Similar topics dominate in academic papers. There is far less interest in an economic analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the sector of educational services. The paper is devoted to educational services in Poland during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study presents a survey of the educational services sector provided within the compulsory (formal) education system conducted using the 5 Forces method By M.E. Porter. The study aims to answer the question about the condition of the educational services sector in Poland in the era of the pandemic (in 2020, 2021), about its potential crisis and potential present and future consequences for educational services. The paper presents a structural analysis of the sector and a diagnosis of the state of the market of educational services in Poland in the field of formal education during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on many reports, in particular those of the Supreme Chamber of Audit, the Centre for Digital Education and a group of researchers at the University of Warsaw. The analysis revealed a crisis in the quality of educational services provided by the state educational system, areas of previous neglect in public education in terms of the development of digital competencies of teachers and school equipment and the growing importance and competitiveness of non-public education in Poland, which shortly, thanks to the pandemic, may break the structural domination of public education.