“We Can Rebuild Schools, But Not Childhoods”: Education Under Fire in Ukraine (2014-2025)

The scope of this report examines the cumulative transformation of Ukraine’s education system over an 11-year period marked by overlapping crises, beginning with the conflict in 2014, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, and critically reshaped by the full-scale war in 2022.
The full-scale war delivered the most devastating blow, transforming education into an exercise in survival with widespread infrastructure destruction, mass displacement, and continuous nationwide disruption that eliminated any possibility of recovery and fundamentally altered the purpose, delivery, and outcomes of learning for an entire generation.

In 2025, education in Ukraine functions as a mechanism for survival, defined by a “safety divide” where access and quality are dictated by proximity to conflict and a family’s financial resources. The prolonged war has created a hidden psychosocial crisis, fundamentally altering children’s cognitive and social development. Simultaneously, widespread isolation has led to “social muscle atrophy,” a systemic decline in children’s ability to navigate interpersonal relationships.

Compounding these challenges is a pervasive, unregulated dependence on Artificial Intelligence, which has created an “illusion of knowledge” in which grades may not reflect actual understanding. By analysing regional disparities, the report demonstrates a fragmented national standard in which a student’s educational quality is increasingly determined by their location, creating a widening, inequitable divide between those in safer, better-resourced areas and those on the front lines.