Moving to Warsaw with children
Moving a family to another country is mostly logistics, and the logistics have an order to them. Get one step out of sequence, sign a lease before you have a school place, and the next two years involve a commute nobody enjoys.
This guide is written for parents arriving in Warsaw, and for the relocation consultants, HR teams and embassy administrators who help them. It covers where families tend to live, how schooling works in Poland, what a school will ask you for, and what changes when a family lands in the middle of a school year.
It is written by a school, so it is worth saying plainly what that means. International American School of Warsaw has been enrolling internationally mobile families since 1989, and we would like you to consider us. We have tried to make everything else here useful whether or not you do.
A rough timeline
Families who arrive calmly tend to have worked backwards from the first day of school, not forwards from the job offer.
Six to nine months out. Draw up a shortlist of schools and understand how your child’s current year group maps onto the Polish and international systems. Grade placement is not always the obvious one to one match, particularly for children moving between the northern and southern hemisphere calendars, or between systems with different cut-off dates.
Three to four months out. Apply. Most international schools in Warsaw admit on a rolling basis, not in a single annual round. What limits a place is availability in a specific year group, not a closing date. Confirm the place before you commit to a district.
Then choose the neighbourhood. This is the step families most often take in the wrong order. Warsaw is not a large city by European standards, but the morning traffic is real, and a cross-city school run twice a day shapes family life more than the flat does.
Six weeks out. Housing, school documents, and any translations or legalisation your child’s records need.
On arrival. Residence registration, a PESEL number, health cover, and the ordinary business of settling a child who has just left their friends behind.
Where families live
Warsaw’s family districts differ more than a map suggests. Some are apartment living with a metro station and a park; some are houses and gardens with a car dependency; a few are close to the forest and quiet in a way that surprises people who expected a capital city.
We have written this up separately, district by district, with the honest commute picture: where families live in Warsaw.
The marker is the school, at the southern end of the city beside the Kabaty forest. Every district on the districts page is described by how it connects back to this point.
How schooling works in Poland
Poland has a well defined state system with compulsory schooling, a national curriculum overseen by the Ministry of National Education, and a school leaving examination called the Matura. International schools sit alongside it, and some, including this one, operate inside it as well as outside it.
If you are arriving from another system, the vocabulary alone takes a while: how schooling works in Poland.
Choosing a school
The real decisions are about curriculum and continuity. Facilities matter far less than they appear to on a tour. Will your child finish this school, or move again in three years? Does the qualification they leave with open the doors you expect it to, in the countries you might actually end up in?
Two longer pieces cover this ground: how to choose an international school in Warsaw, and international schools in Warsaw, compared, which sets out the curriculum models side by side.
Arriving in the middle of the year
Relocation rarely lines up with an academic calendar. A posting starts in November, a contract is signed in February, and a child who was settled somewhere else is suddenly starting again in week fourteen.
Schools that regularly take mid-year arrivals handle this differently from schools that mostly admit in September. Ask directly how often it happens, what the first fortnight looks like, and who is responsible for the child socially as well as academically. A good answer is specific.
Availability genuinely does vary by year group and by month, so the honest response to “is there a place in Grade 7 in January” is that it depends, and the only way to find out is to ask.
If your child does not yet speak English or Polish
Two separate questions get muddled here. One is whether your child can follow lessons. The other is whether they can make friends. Schools tend to answer the first and assume the second follows.
English as an Additional Language support is standard at international schools in Warsaw, and the quality varies. Worth asking: is it delivered inside the classroom or by withdrawing the child from lessons, how is progress measured, and at what point does support stop.
Polish is a separate decision. A family staying two years and a family staying ten will reasonably make different choices about how much Polish their child learns, and a school should be comfortable with both.
The paperwork
The administrative side is more predictable than it looks, and most of it can be started before you arrive. What a school asks for, what needs translating, what needs an apostille, and the timing of it all is set out here: enrolling your child in a Warsaw school.
Finding somewhere to live
How renting works here, what the advertised rent does and does not include, where to look, and which agencies work in English: finding somewhere to live in Warsaw.
For relocation consultants and HR teams
If you are placing a family rather than moving with one, the two questions that decide the outcome are usually grade availability and speed of response. IAS works directly with employers, diplomatic missions and destination service providers, and there is a page covering how those arrangements work: relocating to Warsaw, corporate and diplomatic families.
You are welcome to use anything on these pages with your clients. If a fact here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will fix it.
There is also a short question and answer page on relocation specifically: relocating to Warsaw, questions and answers.
Talking to someone
Admissions answer questions from families who have not decided anything yet, including families who end up choosing a different school. It is not a sales queue.
[email protected] · +48 22 649 14 40 · ul. Dembego 18, Ursynów, Warsaw, a five minute walk from Kabaty metro station.
Next step
Start with the school place, not the flat.
Admissions answer questions from families who have not decided anything yet, including families who end up choosing a different school. We reply within one working day.
