The years of online learning caused first by covid and then by the full-scale war have resulted in academic and skills losses, including socialisation.
This has had a particularly catastrophic effect on primary school children: they are not developing fundamental skills such as social skills, the ability to focus, and to interact with teachers and each other. This was stated by Minister of Education and Science Oksen Lisovyy.
‘Teenagers have their own problems: loneliness, difficulties in adapting to full-time education when they enter universities. We will pay billions for this delayed online education. Each citizen will pay with lost income, and the country as a whole will pay with a drop in GDP. We are losing the quality of human capital,’ he said.
In this regard, the Ministry of Education and Science has set a goal to return 300,000 schoolchildren to full-time education.
‘Firstly, these are children from border, frontline and temporarily occupied territories who were forced to move with their families to safer parts of Ukraine but continue to study in old schools online. There are 121,000 students with official IDP status, that is, those whom the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine can count. The rest are children who stay at home in the same border and frontline areas but cannot study offline due to security risks. For them, the solution is to build shelters where the situation allows, and, for example, to provide communities with buses to bring children to schools that have shelters,’ said Lisovyy.