A year of school taught through a screen

By the spring of 2023 Ukrainian schools had been teaching under attack for a year, mostly online, and a set of practical lessons had emerged.

What was learned

That the binding constraint is not the platform but electricity and connection. A lesson plan is worthless during a blackout. Schools that adapted best moved to recorded material that could be watched whenever power returned, with live sessions kept short and scheduled around known outage patterns.

That devices had to be provided, not assumed. A family with three children and one phone cannot run three simultaneous lessons.

That teachers needed as much support as pupils. Many were themselves displaced, teaching a class scattered across several countries and time zones.

What partners supplied

Laptops and tablets in large numbers, internet connectivity for schools, platform capacity, and funding for the first wave of shelter construction that would make in-person return possible later that year.

Also, less visibly, support for the schools in host countries teaching Ukrainian children — including access to Ukrainian curriculum material so a returning child would not be a year behind.

The point I would make

A year of school is not recoverable later; the child is simply a year older. That is why education spending during a war is not a soft item to be funded once the hard needs are met. It has the shortest deadline of anything on the list.