ON A Saturday morning in a hall in north London, two young children put on a spirited production of a scene from Stanislaw Wyspianski’s “The Wedding”, a tragic satire about national liberation. Fifty or so more, most below the age of ten, watch attentively. It is the first weekend back at school, and the festivities are part of Poland’s national reading day. The performance over, the children stream out into the sunlight, ready for their time off to begin.

For young Poles in Britain, Saturday school is an increasingly common experience. Founded in the late 1940s by refugees, the number and size of such schools has grown fast over the past decade or so. In 2002 there were 45 registered with the Polish Educational Society. There are now 130, with around 20 more unregistered ones and another ten being set up. As one parent explains, “There is a nice kind of pressure to attend. If you don’t, other parents will ask why not.”

The growth reflects the boom since 2004 in Britain’s Polish population. Many of the new schools were established to cater to recent arrivals, who tend to be fluent in Polish and likelier to return to their homeland. Others have separate classes for second- or third-generation migrants, says Malgorzata Lasocka, a former head of the Maria Sklodowska-Curie Polish Saturday School.

It is a trend the Polish government is keen to encourage. Last year it disbursed £1.2m ($1.6m) to such schools across Britain and provided training to teachers. Earlier this year a law passed in the Polish parliament granted pupils at foreign Saturday schools the same benefits when in Poland as natives, such as some free travel and entry to museums. British schools are good at helping newcomers but provide little information on Polish culture, says Arkady Rzegocki, the ambassador. Saturday schools fill that gap.

Government subsidy and the efforts of volunteers mean attendance is cheap: a day’s tuition often comes to less than £10, and payment is sometimes optional. For that, pupils typically receive four hours of classes in the Polish language, history, geography and culture. Schools tend to take pupils up to age 17. Those who remain that long often take GCSEs and A-levels in Polish.

Children who are dragged away from Saturday-morning cartoons seem to benefit from the extra study. Though data are scarce, there is some indication that those who attend Saturday schools do better than their peers in exams, says Kirsty Gillan-Thomas of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, a charity. Just as important, they make friends. In the final class before the performance of “The Wedding”, pupils natter happily to one another, speaking a mixture of Polish and English.

Correction (September 21st): An earlier version of this story quoted the wrong figure for the amount that the Polish government disbursed last year to schools in Britain.