The two years of pandemic followed by the start of the war in Ukraine threaten the education and school trajectory of Ukrainian children, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) warned on Tuesday.
The UN agency stresses that both the children who stayed in Ukraine and those who fled the country after the Russian invasion in February 2022 see their fourth school year disrupted. In total, the conflict and exile threaten the education of 6.7 million Ukrainian children and youth between the ages of 3 and 18denounced Regina de Dominicis, UNICEF’s regional director for Europe and Central Asia.
Children in this former Soviet republic already show widespread signs of loss of consciousness, especially in their command of the Ukrainian language, reading and mathematics, the expert warned after visiting the country. “In Ukraine itself, attacks on schools continue, leaving children deeply distraught and deprived of safe places to learn,” she said.
“This not only forced Ukrainian children to fight to progress in their education, but also not to forget what they learned when their schools were running normally,” he said.
About half of Ukrainian teachers registered deterioration in the level of language, mathematics and foreign languagesindicate the data cited by the United Nations Fund.