General legal position of an individual in terms of education is shaped by the norms of constitutional weight. Among them a special place is taken up by the principle of equal access to education, which is one of the guarantees of the right to education. In the author’s opinion, the above mentioned principle has a close relation to educational diagnostics, especially its normalized part, which is didactic measurement. Therefore, an extralegal element, which is the measurement (of its quality), has a significant influence on the legal position of an individual and determines the possibility to use one of the most fundamental rights. From the pedagogical perspective, the author proposes taking into account the legal environment in which educational diagnostics functions, and which – although roughly – he presents in the article, whereas from the legal perspective he points out to the necessity of taking into account the educational diagnostics’ conditioning in the evaluation process of implementing equal access to education.

The paper deals with the issues related to the right to education under the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 1997 and to the actual operation of the education system. The main focus is on the constitutional guarantee of equal access to education. This guarantee should be treated as Kant’s Regulatory Idea which should be pursued by public authority though its full attainment is not possible in social reality. This study attempts to indicate to what extent the state’s obligation to ensure equal access to education is implemented by the institution of the school in Poland.

The right to education is at the heart of the notion of cultural rights, established in basic laws and international treaties. Meanwhile, outside the official educational system, the phenomenon of tutoring is becoming an increasingly influential factor contributing to the deepening of inequalities in access to education. This article presents the results of research carried out using the survey method - auditorium questionnaire, on the total population of the first-year students of first-cycle programme and long-cycle Master’s programme at the University of Rzeszów. The aim of the article was to indicate the cultural and social factors that determine the use of private tutoring by the surveyed students. The University of Rzeszów is the largest public institution of higher education in south-eastern Poland. The research provided interesting conclusions for the discussion on the development of informal education in the form of additional paid lessons and their impact on the formal education system in Poland.