Nine-year-old Ana, from Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine, has big ambitions. “I love the sea and oceans, so maybe I will work in this,” she says with a toothy grin when her teacher at the Montessori Primary School in Rzeszow, south-east Poland, asks her what she’d like to do when she’s older. As a marine biologist? “Maybe,” she giggles, her eyes flashing before she bashfully lowers her gaze.
Ana, who has never been to the seaside before, is one of thousands of Ukrainian children whose futures are now being shaped far away from home – in schools across Europe, where many have resumed their education after fleeing the war in their home country.
“Straight away we decided that we are going to offer the available places that we have in our school and kindergarten to Ukrainian children,” says Maciej Wantusiak, founder of the Montessori school in Rzeszow, where a handful of Ukrainian refugees have joined the small school’s existing 100 pupils. “We don’t think about it, we just do it.”
But while Ana envisages a future in which she will see waves wash up against a shore, other Ukrainian children find themselves out of education entirely, or stuck behind the screens of online learning. In Poland, more than 185,000 Ukrainian children have enrolled in Polish schools, but given the country is hosting an estimated 2 million refugees, the vast majority of which are women and children, there are likely to be hundreds of thousands of others whose education has been put on hold.
Tanya and Katya, two students from Bohorodchany, near Ivano-Frankivsk, did not leave the country like Ana but stayed in the relative safety of Western Ukraine.
The two teenagers, who were in their final year, picking dresses for their leaver’s party at the end of June, have not been able to attend school in person for two months, since the outbreak of war forced all schools in Ukraine to switch to online learning.
Compared to many Ukrainian children, they count themselves lucky; their school has not been destroyed by bombs or artillery fire, and teachers are still able to run online lessons.
But while their education isn’t over entirely, their plans for the future – plans to study at university in Lviv and Kyiv —- are now a series of questions without answers.
“The normal exams have been cancelled and replaced with some sort of war-time multi-test in Ukrainian, maths and history, but we don’t know what it is and we are waiting for more information,” explains Katya.
“I have less motivation for studying for the multi-test now because I had been working hard for other subjects for years. It’s awful, I’m looking for another educational institution in a safe place because I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”
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In the gym hall of Katya’s school, now a shelter for internally displaced people, two teenage sisters are attending online lessons beamed in from their school in Kharkiv – but they were not able to escape with laptops, and so all their studying is conducted on the small screen of a smartphone.
Ihor Onkalyuk, headmaster at the school in Bohorodchany, says the coronavirus pandemic has proved a double-edged sword: while it meant they were prepared for the switch to online teaching, he is particularly worried about the compounded consequences of this war-time disruption for a generation already hugely affected by long periods of online schooling.
“I really hope that students will want to study online and have the motivation to do so,” Mr Onkalyuk says. “But of course I am concerned about their emotional state, their anxiety – particularly the school leavers going out into the world and not knowing what to do when a country is at war.”
Also aware of the psychological role education plays in children’s lives, in Rzeszow, he also hired two Ukrainian teachers who had fled to Poland, to help the children integrate into the classroom.
For one of those teachers, Maryna, who worked in a kindergarten in Kyiv before the war, resuming her usual job has proven to be a lifeline not just for the children, but for herself as well.
I think a school is the best place where I can be now, with children who I can help and teach,” she says. “I have watched them – I have helped them – come out of their shell and that helps me, to be useful to my country.”
