In schools, career advisors will appear for 8th and 9th grade students

In schools, career advisors will appear for 8th and 9th grade students

At the end of July, the Ministry of Education and Science released a plan for returning students to in-person learning, under which the number of distance learning classes in Ukraine will be significantly reduced, and some internally displaced children will need to transfer to schools at their current location.

Thus, they want to improve the quality of education in Ukraine, which was severely impacted by distance learning, which began during the pandemic and continued due to the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Meanwhile, the fate of teachers, some of whom may temporarily remain without workload or even without jobs, remains an open question.

As of September 1, 2024, the number of students studying remotely is almost 500 thousand. This means many schools have created shelters, resumed in-person learning, or expanded existing shelters, so children have returned to in-person education instead of hybrid learning.

The concept of senior specialized schools includes profiles such as humanities, natural sciences, technology, etc.

A student after the 9th grade will choose a profile that corresponds to the educational trajectory they plan to follow. Therefore, we are currently working on having career counselors in grades 8-9 who will help with selecting a profile in the 10th grade.

Their task will be to help students choose, firstly, the directions that interest them, and secondly, those that are needed for future engineers, programmers — specialists who can work on developments, including new technologies.

Unfortunately, we indeed don’t have a large number of students who want to choose these specific profiles. Currently, senior high schools have relevant profiles, but if we look at the data, more than 70% are humanities.

The goal of the specialized secondary education reform is to ensure that students choose not only humanities profiles. There are various tools: equipping schools with good STEM laboratories, encouraging students to choose these profiles through career counselors, and other tools that we want to implement.