Abstract:

Providing equal social and educational opportunities for students by the school becomes one of the major democratic enterprise in contemporary world. It is an extremely important challenge towards young learners who grow up in unfavourable social, economical and cultural family background and thus they find limited access to their full development and restricted future life chances. That is why school environment should take every step to decrease consequences of children’s existence observed in insufficient family conditions through activating actions towards supporting education and upbringing processes. The most important issue in that case is to become open towards those who come from dysfunctional families and give them a chance towards a better life making them equipped with essential tools in order to explore, search and change their lives. The aim of the article is to present conclusions based on the research on early stage students’ functioning who come from Polish dysfunctional families found both in their family, school and peer environment and revealed in that way unfavourable consequences for the young people development and their future. The research was carried out with the use of quantity and quality methods. Quality study comprised 29 early stage education students and their families in order to give detailed recognition of the scale for their deprivation needs, which have wide influence on their further life chances. While conducting quality research an individual case method was used whereas a quantity method was mainly based on a diagnostic survey method and comprised 69 teachers and 4 head-teachers of the monitored students’ schools, in order to establish supporting actions offered towards that group of students. To provide firm results, the range of the study was expanded over a group of 124 teachers of early stage school education who represented 34 schools from Mazovian Region, central Poland. The main objective of the supporting research was to examine opportunities offered by other schools towards providing equal social opportunities to students who come from dysfunctional families. The study analysis reveals that these children are endangered with varied kinds of unfavourable consequences. In many cases the problems occurred as a result of their family background of low social, economic and cultural status. In the context of the observed development inconveniences found among that group of children and clearly perceived unfavourable development consequences, there are faint possibilities to reduce the results by their school environment. The article was also aimed to present the areas of activating actions within school environment towards supporting the processes of education among early stage education students with an emphasis on organizing psycho-educational situations, which again might contribute to an increase in existential consciousness and show alternative possibilities towards favorable changes for the students’ future life.

Keywords:

Early stage school pupil, dysfunctional family, giving equal opportunities.