This article explores the role of school staff in the accessibility of education with a focus on professional discretion and its relation with institutions and contexts. Drawing on the street-level bureaucracy approach it looks into different types of discretionary practices and asks how their legitimacy influences their success. The analysis is based on different types of data and exemplary trajectories are used as illustration. Results show that discretion can be used to both increase and reduce accessibility: proactivity is elicited when societal goals are shared, but means are considered inadequate and when control over the process is high. Negative reactivity is associated with overworking and silo professional cultures.

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The pork value chain is created by a network of interconnected suppliers and customers, offering meat products to final consumers. Pork production and processing in Poland is highly fragmented, which together with an increasing global pressure weakens the engagement of institutional actors in the social dialogue. This makes difficult to combat negative labour market phenomena such as low wages, long working hours, and lack of appropriate contracts. In order to diagnose the specificity of labour market challenges in Poland and possible ways of combating them, structured interviews with key stakeholders were conducted. They confirmed the existence of abusive practices in the local pork industry and the need for strengthening the social dialogue. Conclusions from the research include recommendations for further exploration of the issue.

Education is considered as an important factor of well-prosperous economy. Education which corresponds to the needs of a labour market becomes the key educational target of young people and employees who want to adopt to the changes at the labour market. Therefore there are still challenges for education in Poland – how to modify the process of teaching and how to infl uence the process of learning in such a way that education would become an important factor in growth of human and social capital. Contemporary education should take into account variable requirements of the labour market, including also needs of the present and future employees and employers. An important challenge for education in Poland is to adopt its structure and teaching programs to the needs of employees not only on the domestic labor market, by also on the labour markets of other countries, mainly in Europe. Simultaneously, Polish educational system must be competitive with respect to those of other European countries, take into account demographic and technological changes in order to prepare employees willing to work in diff erent countries.