“Ukrainian preschool education faced unprecedented challenges. The main problems today are a sharp decline in the birth rate, critically low salaries for educators and safety requirements that do not allow kindergartens to be opened without shelter. This was announced in an interview by Deputy Minister of Education and Science Anastasia Konovalova. According to Konovalova, three key crises have accumulated in the system of preschool education: • low wages”, — write on: ua.news
Ukrainian preschool education faced unprecedented challenges. The main problems today are a sharp decline in the birth rate, critically low salaries for educators and safety requirements that do not allow kindergartens to be opened without shelter.
This was announced in an interview by Deputy Minister of Education and Science Anastasia Konovalova.
According to Konovalova, three key crises have accumulated in the preschool education system:
• low salaries, which do not allow to retain and motivate teachers;
• security situation — institutions cannot work without equipped shelters;
• deep demographic crisis.
Konovalova noted that the sharp drop in the birth rate has led to the fact that kindergartens are half-empty in many communities. The topic of overcrowded kindergartens, which was once relevant for big cities, is no longer on the agenda.
For the first time since independence, Kyiv is able to provide a place in kindergarten for almost every child. Queues remain only at certain popular establishments and in satellite cities — Irpen, Buchi, Vyshgorod — due to the large number of internally displaced persons.
Statistics record a sharp drop in the number of children of younger age groups:
• aged 3–6 years — 881 thousand;
• aged 0-3 years — only 570 thousand.
This indicates a stable and deep decline in the birth rate.
According to Konovalova, in the next three years, Ukraine will lose about 200,000 children aged 3-6, which is the equivalent of approximately two thousand large kindergartens.
“We need to preserve the network of preschool institutions, because we are expecting an increase in the birth rate. We cannot do as in the nineties, when everything was covered up and distributed,” the deputy minister emphasized.
Ella Libanova, director of the Institute of Demography and Social Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, also spoke about the situation. She believes that after the end of the war, there will be no mass departure of Ukrainians abroad.
Most of the women who wanted to leave have already done so, she said, while others are unlikely to leave now — conditions for refugees have worsened and aid, which was provided in 2022, has been cut or stopped altogether in many countries.
