The Price of Educational Losses During the War: An Expert on the Critical Problems of Modern Ukraine
The war in Ukraine turned the education crisis into one of the biggest threats to the future generation. The problems that arose during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic have significantly deepened due to prolonged hostilities and large-scale destruction. Millions of children find themselves in a situation where education has become not only physically inaccessible, but also significantly more difficult due to the destruction of schools, the lack of safe places to study and long interruptions in the educational process.
Today, more than 1.9 million Ukrainian children study remotely or in a mixed form, and many of them have not attended school physically for several years. In some cases, students of lower grades have never sat at desks at all. Russian aggression continues to destroy the educational infrastructure: more than 3,800 educational institutions have been damaged, of which about 400 have been completely destroyed. Every seventh school in Ukraine was affected by the war, and hundreds of schools are located in the occupied territories.
According to UNICEF, 5.3 million Ukrainian children face a lack of access to education, of which 3.6 million are directly affected by the destruction of schools. This calls into question not only their academic success, but also the development of critically important social skills that are formed in the process of collective learning. Under these conditions, education in Ukraine needs immediate attention, innovative solutions and systemic support.
Head of the Department of Educational Programs and Analytics of the savED Charitable Fund Anastasia Onatiy analyzes an extremely important topic – educational losses, which have become one of the most invisible, but critical problems of modern Ukraine. She emphasizes that the consequences of a long war affect the quality of education much more deeply than it seems at first glance. Educational losses are not only about grades, it is about the future of the country, about the possibility of its reconstruction and development in a few decades.
The perception of ordinary citizens about education during war is often limited by the physical destruction of schools, the lack of shelter, or the mass migration of teachers and students abroad. However, Anastasia draws attention to a less obvious side of the problem: what happens to the learning process itself? How do children who remain in Ukraine acquire knowledge and develop skills in difficult conditions of constant stress, power outages and air raid sirens?
She gives specific examples: Oksana from Novogrigorivka, who has hardly been to school since the beginning of the pandemic and still does not understand the topic of interest; Ivan from Izyum, who, due to the lack of qualified English teachers, cannot construct sentences in the Present Continuous; Oleg, who has been communicating with his classmates for three years only through a laptop screen and has no public speaking skills. These cases are not exceptions, but illustrations of large-scale and systemic educational losses that have been accumulating since the pandemic, and have become even deeper with the onset of a full-scale invasion.
Educational losses, according to Onatiy, have two main components: academic and social. The academic component is unlearned knowledge that is basic for further learning. For example, Oksana, who has not mastered percentages, faces difficulties in chemistry, physics and other subjects. The social component includes interaction skills that are formed through joint activities in the classroom: working in groups, the ability to negotiate, speaking in front of an audience. These skills are key for the modern world, because they determine the competitiveness of young people in the labor market.
Anastasia emphasizes that losses in both these areas will have long-term consequences. In 7-10 years, current schoolchildren will become workers who will feel the consequences of insufficient knowledge and skills in offices and factories. At the same time, this problem is not unique to Ukraine: even during the COVID-19 pandemic, studies by the OECD and the World Bank modeled how educational losses affect the economy. Inadequate skills in the workforce lead to lower incomes, a shortage of capital and, ultimately, a fall in GDP. For example, the world economy lost 11 trillion dollars due to the educational consequences of the pandemic. Ukraine does not remain aloof either. According to a World Bank report this year, today’s schoolchildren lose about $5.5 billion over their working lives due to not receiving an education in wartime. And as long as the conflict continues, these losses will only increase.
According to the expert, the results of educational research, in particular PISA-2022, confirm this alarming dynamic. Ukrainian students lag behind in mathematics, reading and science not only their European peers, but also within the country – children from rural areas have much worse results than their peers from cities. The situation is also complicated by the loss of access to quality education: 63% of teachers admit that students’ academic performance has deteriorated. The children themselves are also aware of the problem: in the frontline regions, 43% of students indicate that their knowledge and skills have become worse since 2022.
Anastasia believes that the impact of war on education is not limited to short-term losses. If systemic measures are not taken, the consequences will be felt for decades, affecting the country’s competitiveness, access to international education, and the integration of Ukrainian graduates into the global professional space.
Anastasia Onatiy emphasizes that the first step to overcoming educational losses is the awareness of this problem by all participants in the educational process – teachers, parents and students themselves. According to her, the fact that 98% of Ukrainian teachers recognize the presence of academic gaps in children’s knowledge creates a basis for work in this direction. However, this is not enough, because the independent efforts of teachers and parents, who organize consultations or provide additional materials, only partially solve the problem.
The expert notes that charitable initiatives have become an important resource for overcoming educational losses. Such projects finance additional hours of work for teachers, provide methodical support, develop materials for making up knowledge and create interactive platforms for individual assistance to students. She emphasizes that these programs give children a real opportunity to regain lost knowledge, but at the same time they lack a systematic approach at the national level.
According to Onatiy, parents and teachers should actively participate in any available educational activities aimed at bridging gaps. At the same time, it is important to know how to find such opportunities and how to ensure that they meet the needs of students.
Speaking about existing solutions, she cites the example of programs organized by the savED foundation. These programs are implemented in the format of so-called educational “Beehives” — equipped locations in schools, communal facilities or shelters, where tutors work with children of different ages. In 2024, more than 25,000 students completed these courses, and 84% of them showed significant progress in their studies.
Anastasia draws attention to the fact that diagnostic testing carried out within the programs allows identifying common problems among students regardless of the region. For example, the greatest loss of knowledge is shown by fifth-graders who have not mastered key topics in elementary school. In the Ukrainian language, comprehension of the read text is a common problem, and in mathematics, the gaps in the students of grades 7-9 can be traced back to the program of grades 4-5.
According to the expert, such courses are effective thanks to a systematic analysis of progress and an individual approach to each student. However, for a large-scale solution to this problem, it is necessary to create a national support system that will ensure the availability of such programs for all Ukrainian students, regardless of their place of residence.
