Society has just shaken up (and that’s good! ) from the journalistic investigation " Info" The school functioned in the premises of the monastery " Although it worked like a regular school - children from grades 1 to 9 studied five days a week from 9:00 to 14:00, there was even an extended day group. Since this “school” does not have a license, formally the documents of the students who studied there were in two other licensed Ukrainian schools.

There is already a reaction from the Minister of Education Oksen Lisovoy, who instructed the chairman of the State Service for the Quality of Education of Ukraine to immediately begin an inspection of the institutions in which the documents of the children who actually studied in the underground “school” in question were “laid.”. The minister also emphasized the need to verify the actions of managers and teachers involved in this activity, including by law enforcement agencies. The assessment of the situation, obviously, should be made by the Security Service of Ukraine, taking into account the suspicion of subversive activities that were carried out on the territory of one of the Kyiv churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the fourth year of a full-scale war.

You don’t have to be a prophet to predict that people’s deputies, especially those involved in education, will “warm their hands” and promote themselves at this vile event. And I have already seen several messages and statements on social networks.

And from now on, I want to divert attention from all the noise and foam around the fact that journalists were investigating, and look deeper, look for answers to the questions: “What was the reason / basis for something like this to happen in the capital of the state? \?

One large community in western Ukraine is home to 1,509 internally displaced people of school age. 919 of them do not attend local schools. And they have every legal right to do this, because they can study or be formally enrolled, as in the case of the investigation, in their home schools. At the same time, “home schools” are completely dependent on the presence of these students, and therefore may not exert any pressure regarding the level of involvement of such students in the educational process and their educational achievements. In the other two communities in the relatively safe territories of the west of the country, with which I have contacts, they do not know at all how many school-age children from among the internally displaced are not studying in local schools.

That is, IDP children may formally not study anywhere for four years if their parents are not very concerned about this. So what do they do then What do they do? Where and how do they spend their free time (and there is plenty of it)?

Just don’t rush to throw stones towards the Ministry of Education and Science, as is our custom. A few years ago, the Ministry of Education and Science formed a policy called “offline school”, within the framework of which they developed the “Procedure and conditions for obtaining general secondary education in communal institutions of general secondary education during martial law in Ukraine” and made changes to some regulatory documents that determined the procedure for organizing training. This Procedure and changes to the regulations were postponed several times, finalized and, in the end, documents were received that formed the very rules for obtaining school education, which were sorely lacking. In particular, a rule was also envisaged according to which children had to attend schools at their place of residence if there was an opportunity for full-time education. Associations of local self-government bodies (not all of them supported the process), representatives of communities with different security conditions, including those located close to hostilities, and experts from international projects were involved in the development and finalization of these documents. In the end, the documents were finally adopted, but a month later all the developments were finally canceled under political pressure. Rumor has it that this was the condition of the group of people’s deputies, under which the current minister remained in office in the summer of 2025. But this already smacks of conspiracy theories.

Therefore, the main gap (or even the whole hole! ) for the activities of various kinds of school “family clubs” gapes in all directions.

Another problem is the free choice by parents of the form of education, and under martial law, even without control and restrictions. In simple words, parents, under any conditions, desire/unwillingness or whim, can write an application and transfer their child to a family form or external education. Both of these forms do not include school attendance.. Moreover, they do not even provide for monitoring educational achievements and mechanisms for influencing the child’s return to school..

And this is already a reproach towards the Ministry of Education and Science. Because it’s one thing when short-term relaxations of requirements are allowed to solve big problems (war), and quite another when it’s a system stretched over years that turns into a legal loophole.

If the children who studied in that family club school from the investigation formally received education in two other institutions in a family or external form, then the directors of those schools did not violate the law at all and can continue their activities, the moral side of which does not concern them.

But I will say more: the directors of thousands of Ukrainian schools, whose students are in family education or external studies, do not even know where these students can be and in which “clubs” they study or spend time. And that's the problem. Big problem.