Five years of disrupted schooling in Ukraine has led to ‘emotional instability in children’

For five consecutive years, children in Ukraine have not have any form of “normal” schooling. From COVID19 to the ongoing war in the country, the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science reported that some 4.6 million children in Ukraine face barriers to education and 2 million of them have seen their school close down. In an interview with Vatican News’ Marie Duhamel, Laura Frigenti, the Director-General of the Global Partnership for Education—the largest global fund dedicated to education—spoke about the effects of the war in Ukraine on children’s education.
Frigenti highlighted there are two main consequences of the war on the educational system. The first is “that half of the infrastructure was destroyed, and so the children had to stop going to school and start remote education,” she explained. The children’s rights NGO Plan International reported that about 30% of Ukraine’s educational buildings have been damaged and over 365 schools completely destroyed since 2022. Despite moving online, constant, quality education remains difficult for children to receive as power outages and limited internet access create barriers.
This physical consequence of the war on education has also led to “an emotional instability in many children, which prevents them from fully achieving the objectives that they could achieve under normal circumstances,” as Frigenti described. She pointed out that the children as a result need psycho-emotional support “to make sure that they can compensate the crisis that they are experiencing in their life.” Thus, whenever possible, Frigenti said they try to bring children together physically to help them learn about each other and improve their social skills. However, this is not always possible due to the bombings.
A survey of 1,000 fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds conducted by Plan International in February 2025 showed that one in five have missed between one and two years of education as a result of the war.