Measuring what was lost, and teaching it again

Ukrainian children lost classroom time twice: first to the pandemic, then to the war. For some cohorts that is most of their primary schooling delivered through a screen or not at all.

By 2023 the response had matured past keeping the system running. The question had become: what specifically has been lost, for which children, and how is it recovered?

Why measurement had to come first

Learning loss is not uniform. A child in a western city with reliable electricity and a parent at home lost far less than a child who was displaced twice and studied through blackouts. Averages hide that completely. Assessment — actually testing what children know — is what tells you where to put the resources.

Reading in the early grades is the priority everywhere, because a child who does not read fluently by a certain age cannot access anything else in the curriculum, and the gap compounds every year afterwards.

What partners funded

Small-group tutoring, additional teaching hours, summer catch-up programmes, teacher training in remedial methods, and the assessment instruments themselves. Alongside it, psychological support, because a child who is anxious does not learn regardless of how good the teaching is.

This is slow, unspectacular work with a payoff twenty years out. It is also, measured across a lifetime of earnings, among the highest-return spending in this entire record.