The savED International Charitable Foundation together with the U-LEAD with Europe Programme and the VoxPopuli Research Agency organised the study “War and Education. Two Years of Full-Scale Invasion”. Research results were presented on February 10 with the support of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.
The study consisted of two parts:
- A representative nationwide survey of students aged 14 and older, their parents, educators, representatives of school administrations and local self-government bodies in all oblasts of Ukraine.
- Study cases (practices) of establishing access to education were analysed in 15 municipalities of the Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Sumy, Kharkiv and Chernihiv Oblasts.
The results of the study show that despite the war, most children remain in their schools. However, 6% of students combine schooling in Ukraine with schooling abroad.
In most municipalities participating in the study, schools were ready for the educational process as of the beginning of the 2023/2024 school year. This was reported by 80% of the interviewed representatives of local self-government. However, 20% of them noted that an average of 6% of schools are unsuitable for teaching.
One of the main challenges for local authorities is the attraction of financial resources and access to them. 83% of local self-government representatives claim that their municipalities raise funds to improve education even outside the local budget. 59% named foreign aid, 53% mentioned regional budget funds, 27% claimed aid from Ukrainian charities.
62% of students and 79% of parents believe that learning is most effective when all or the vast majority of classes are held offline. According to them, the main barrier to learning is air raid alarms.
Students, educators and administrations have different views on the dynamics of success compared to peacetime. Educators and representatives of school administrations are much more critical in their assessments. According to 63% of educators and 66% of school administrators, student performance is declining, while only 21% of students share the same opinion. At the same time, 38% of students believe that their academic performance has improved, and 40% believe that it has not changed. Despite this, the majority of educators (61%) and representatives of school administrations (65%) are rather or completely satisfied with the academic progress of students.
As for educational losses, the opinions of educators and school administrations are divided. One half says that there are no educational losses or they are insignificant, the other believes that there are such losses. Still, the respondents are positive about the prospects for success in the current academic year. 51% of students, 52% of parents and 58% of educators expect academic performance to improve.
Most students claim knowledge gaps. They place the responsibility for this on themselves, in particular due to low motivation and laziness. At the same time, students note the large number of subjects and the comparative difficulty of some of them. Educators, on the other hand, focus on students’ lack of motivation and inability to exert effort. Among the most popular reasons among parents and school administrations is the distance learning format.
All groups share the opinion that academic success depends primarily on the personal efforts of students. 63% of students, 67% of parents, 72% of educators and 64% of administration representatives consider this factor to be among the top 2. 33‒50% call it the most important.
In addition to the educational process and academic success, the researchers also studied the emotional state of the participants in the educational process. The results of the study showed that parents and teachers evaluate the emotional state of children to be better than the children themselves believe. At least three times more children have anxiety disorders than their parents and teachers believe. While only 2–4% of parents, teachers and representatives of administrations believe that children suffer from moderate to severe anxiety, this figure is 12% among students. Over the past two weeks, at the time of the survey, 37% of students had only positive emotions/feelings. However, 51% of parents expressed the opinion that their children had only positive emotions/feelings in the last two weeks.
The students’ anxiety is also reflected in their vision of the future. When asked how they generally feel about the future of Ukraine, students are the group where the lowest level of optimism is observed. A quarter of students (24%) are pessimistic, and another 25% are neither optimistic nor pessimistic. Among 52% of optimistic students, 31% are rather optimistic about the future of the state.
53% of students wish to stay in Ukraine after school, 23% of them want to live in another locality. A quarter of respondents (26%) want to move abroad.
Continuing their education is a desirable scenario for 77% of students. In particular, 35% of them would like to enter a Ukrainian university they see as a top university, 25% wish to enrol into other universities, technical schools or colleges of Ukraine, 18% see themselves as students in an educational institution abroad. After graduation, 6% of students plan to find a job, 4% wish to enlist, and 7% would like to take a gap year.
The results were presented in a hybrid format. Together with representatives of municipalities, Oksen Lisovyi, Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine, took part in a panel discussion on overcoming the effects of war in municipalities. Anna Putsova, co-founder of savED, spoke about digital educational centres and their impact on restoring access to education.