Merton’s law on unintended consequences (1936) warns against the undesirable and unanticipated outcomes of every action and policy. More recent research (Zhao, 2017) in the field of education, in relation to Merton, claims that these consequences are usually treated as inconvenient side effect of a policy, but are, in fact, planned by policy-makers or other stakeholders to benefit them. It is therefore more appropriate to call them ‘(un)intended consequences’, which are not written into the policy but are a result of how the policy translates into practice. This paper, in relation to the above approaches, aims at revealing (un)intended consequences and hidden agendas of the educational reform conducted by the Polish government in 2016, with a special focus on their impact on ECEC. (Un)intended consequences are investigated here in four dimensions, including ECEC: organisational changes, curriculum, management and educators. The paper is based on the review of literature and on the author’s qualitative and quantitative research among parents, teachers and representatives of local authorities, carried out in the 2018/2019 school year.

中文翻译：

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（Un）波兰2016年教育改革对幼儿教育和照料的预期结果。导致严重疾病的一些应用故事

默顿关于意外后果的法律（1936年）警告说，每项行动和政策的不良后果都是无法预料的。与默顿相关的教育领域的最新研究（Zhao，2017）声称这些后果通常被视为一项政策的不便副作用，但实际上是由决策者或其他利益相关者计划的，以使他们受益他们。因此，将它们称为“（非）意料之中的后果”更为合适，这些后果未写入政策中，而是政策转化为实践的结果。本文针对上述方法，旨在揭示波兰政府2016年进行的教育改革的（意外）后果和隐藏的议程，并特别关注其对ECEC的影响。这里从四个方面研究了（非）预期的后果，包括ECEC：组织变革，课程，管理和教育者。该论文基于文献综述以及作者在2018/2019学年期间在父母，老师和地方当局代表之间进行的定性和定量研究。