Even when the topic is simple, planning a six-day international conference can be challenging. The complexity increases in ways that spreadsheets cannot handle when the event includes a Holocaust memorial site, tree-planting ceremonies for dozens of national delegations, and parallel sessions covering seven thematic axes about children’s rights. The 78th OMEP World Assembly and Conference, which will take place in Poznań from July 13–18, 2026, is essentially what the Polish OMEP Committee and the Faculty of Educational Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University have taken on.
Pausing on the scale is worthwhile. Nothing quite this multi-layered has been attempted by OMEP in recent memory. The 2025 Bologna conference, which focused on the arts and culture in early childhood education, was significant; however, Poznań is bringing aspects that Bologna lacked. A trip to Treblinka prior to assembly. Each OMEP national committee will receive a tree and a plaque with a quote from Korczak during a forest planting. The university’s historic Aula hosted a formal World Assembly. After that, there will be three full days of symposia, poster sessions, workshops, study visits to nearby early childhood centers, plenary lectures, and a gala dinner. The Poznań Science and Technology Park is mentioned in the secretariat email, indicating that the organizers have already sought infrastructure support outside of the university.
Although the scale is different, the Polish Committee has experience with this type of work. In October 2021, Adam Mickiewicz University and Polish OMEP co-hosted a smaller international e-conference on Microsoft Teams that examined children’s rights to high-quality education. Polish organizers at the time included Renata Michalak and Ewa Lewandowska, who collaborated with the European vice president and the world president of OMEP. It was a virtual event, confined by time zones and screens. Poznań 2026 is a completely different event, requiring hotel blocks, transportation logistics to Treblinka, simultaneous interpretation, venue management across several buildings, and collaboration with partners such as the Treblinka Museum, UNESCO, UNICEF, and the International Janusz Korczak Association.
It seems that the Polish organizers recognized early on that the conference theme would require equal amounts of logistical and emotional accuracy. You can’t use a typical conference template to honor Korczak, the pediatrician and educator who chose to walk his orphanage’s children into Treblinka rather than abandon them. Internal registration closed in February 2026, and the pre-assembly event on July 13 is only open to OMEP members, indicating that the Treblinka visit required careful capacity planning months in advance. Routine event logistics does not include transporting buses to a memorial site, organizing a ceremonial planting with museum personnel, or handling the location’s emotional impact for a global audience.
Back in Poznań, the academic scaffolding is supported scientifically by Waldemar Segiet, the dean of educational studies, and Bogumiła Kaniewska, the rector of the university. It is not only symbolic but also practically important to have institutional support at that level. It probably entails having access to administrative personnel, university facilities, and a level of bureaucratic smoothness that is difficult for foreign organizing committees to match. Although Poznań in particular has positioned itself as a destination for international academic gatherings, Poland’s conference infrastructure has expanded significantly over the past ten years, though it still lacks the automatic name recognition of a Warsaw or Kraków.
The extent to which this ambition will result in the type of outcome document that the organizers have in mind is still unknown. The Poznań Declaration 2026, a collective statement on children’s rights, inclusion, sustainability, and peace, is anticipated to be produced by the conference. International education conference declarations can occasionally come across as ceremonial, with their wording being so cautious as to be ambiguous. However, the Polish team appears to be constructing something with enough structural weight—the Treblinka memorial, the Korczak connection, and the collaboration with significant UN agencies—that the declaration may actually land with some force. It’s possible that the setting’s intense emotional impact will accomplish what policy language by itself rarely does.
It’s difficult to ignore how much depends on the logistics when observing the preparations from the outside. The concepts are potent. The legacy is significant. But getting several hundred educators from dozens of nations through a week that includes a research conference, a formal assembly, and a Holocaust site without something going wrong? That’s the part about which no declarations are made.
