How Ukraine should overcome educational losses

© Освитория Author Anna Sydoruk Chief Operating Officer of "Osvitoria" NGO More than three years have passed since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, almost a year and a half since the full-scale invasion of Russia. We’ve been experiencing forced pause in education, damaged and destroyed schools, blackouts, the impossibility of organizing face-to-face classes in some regions as Ukraine lives in a hellish whirlpool of war.

It is obvious that all this affects education in the country and causes educational losses. ВАС ЗАИНТЕРЕСУЕТ THE OCCUPIED. Russianization of Ukrainian Education in the Temporarily Occupied Territories However, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that the topic of educational losses is relevant not only for us.

It is key for education policymakers around the world. This year, I attended the Education World Forum in London (so to say, it’s an educational Davos), where world-class experts discussed educational losses caused, in particular, by the COVID pandemic. Governments of various countries and educational organizations are currently working on overcoming educational losses, developing various methods.

Meanwhile, for example, the World Bank says that only 19% of countries have approved plans to minimize such losses. The World Bank calls the current education crisis the biggest and worst in the last century. Studies show that children in low-income countries have experienced the greatest educational losses.

According to the World Bank publication The State of Global Learning Poverty: 2022 Update , as a result of the education crisis exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, about 70% of ten-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries cannot understand simple written text after reading it, compared to 57% before pandemic In their report, they calculated that the consequences of COVID for education cost the world economy 17 trillion dollars.

And research by The New York Times suggests that it will take three to five years to reverse the educational losses caused by COVID .

At the Teachers of the Future education festival, which took place on June 22-23 in Lviv, I moderated the panel discussion “Overcoming educational losses: challenges, ways, tools.” We talked about why it is difficult to determine the scope of educational losses in Ukraine, what are the key principles of overcoming them, what tools for this already exist and how to overcome educational losses in the de-occupied territories.

See the main points in the article below. The concept of “educational loss” is not new. It gained global importance and came to the attention of many people after the COVID-19 pandemic, said Tetiana Vakulenko, the director of the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment.

Almost all countries concerned about education sounded the alarm and began to find out how distance and the experiences of children affect learning. Even then, the majority of European countries testified that the results of educational achievements are decreasing.

“The reasons are explained in the definition. Educational loss is the difference between what students could and should have achieved under normal conditions and what they have achieved under the existing conditions,” the speaker explained. Vakulenko noted that it is extremely difficult to answer the question about the scope of educational losses in Ukraine, because we do not have a reporting and reference point.

For many years, almost the only data on educational achievements were provided by the results of ZNO (Independent External Evaluation), DPA (Final State Certification), NMT (National Multi-Subject Test). “We need a quality system of educational assessments at all key stages of education.

We need to know what the child feels, knows, what competencies are formed in them at different stages of development. The state must aggregate this information, analyze it, and draw conclusions about how to work with these categories,” the speaker confidently stated.

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