The decision to host the 78th OMEP World Assembly and World Conference in Poznań, Poland, in July is subtly controversial. It appears to be a logistical decision at first glance—a European city, convenient transit, and academic facilities. However, Janusz Korczak, a pediatrician and educator who spent his life arguing that children are not future citizens waiting to become real people, was born in Poznań. Right now, they are actual people. When you consider what OMEP 2026 is truly attempting to achieve, that seemingly insignificant distinction has significant political implications.
The theme of the July 13–18 conference is “When a Child Speaks… Korczak’s Inspirations for Education and Children’s Rights.” It’s a lovely phrase. If you look closely at what is being planned around it, you will see that it is also a specific demand. SDG Target 4.2—ensuring that all girls and boys have access to high-quality early childhood care and education before they reach primary school age—was pledged by governments that ratified the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Four years remain until that deadline. In many regions of the world, the progress has been insufficient.
Mercedes Mayol Lassalle, who is still a member of OMEP’s executive committee and held the position of World President until the end of 2025, has spent years bridging this precise gap between official commitment and real-world application. She has a unique perspective because of her work at the University of Buenos Aires and her participation in the drafting of the Tashkent Declaration. She has seen governments reaffirm these objectives in conference rooms while the infrastructure for high-quality early childhood education is either understaffed, underfunded, or nonexistent back home. Observing people like her work in these settings gives the impression that people’s tolerance for symbolic gestures is waning.
OMEP 2026’s intentional layering of accountability and legacy sets it apart from the typical international education conference circuit. Korczak provided children with real courts where they could file complaints against adults, ran real schools, and wrote real children’s newspapers. He put his theories to the test in the real world. This grounding is important. It is a challenge to educators and policymakers to consider whether their commitments are merely documented; invoking his name is not ornamentation.
A different thread in this discussion is the data thread, which is represented by Rutgers economist Steven Barnett, whose long-term research on early childhood programs like Perry Preschool helped establish the economic case for investing in the early years. High-quality early education benefits entire societies as well as individual children, as demonstrated by his decades of benefit-cost analyses. There is a foundation of evidence. It has been around for a long time. Knowledge is not the gap. It’s will.
Another dimension is provided by Laura Lundy, whose Space, Voice, Audience, and Influence participation model has been embraced by organizations and governments ranging from the European Commission to Ireland. She basically argues that children’s involvement in decisions that impact them is a legal right rather than a courtesy. It is difficult to ignore the gap between that language and the everyday lives of millions of children who lack access to preschool, qualified teachers, or any kind of safe learning environment while listening to delegates discuss participation frameworks in a Poznań conference hall.
The conference is specifically intended to address that gap. Poznań aims to shift the conversation from expression to agency, from honoring children’s voices to actually doing something structural with them, building on the creative, arts-focused momentum from last year’s event in Bologna. Here, the commitments made in the Tashkent Declaration are being reviewed. It refers to the UNESCO Recommendation on Education for Peace. These footnotes are not informal.
It is still unclear if OMEP 2026 will be able to overcome the conference-as-ritual issue that besets international education advocacy. However, the 2030 deadline’s urgency, Korczak’s selection of Poland, and the expertise gathered indicate that this gathering is more significant than most. If you want to call it that, the true hidden agenda is accountability, which is modest, persistent, and long overdue.
