On June 17, 2024, Teach for Ukraine NGO hosted the very first Educational SUPport Tutors’ Congress in Kyiv — marking the culmination of a two-year effort to address learning losses, carried out in partnership with the World Bank and supported by UBS Optimus Foundation. While the final evaluation is still underway, we’re excited to share highlights from the project and insights from the event.
The Congress gathered 100 educators with tutoring competencies from across the country. In total, over 300 teachers were involved in the study and delivered more than 50,000 tutoring sessions as part of the project.
“When we talk about learning losses, we’re really talking about a loss of the future. Learning loss is a loss of potential, a loss of development — and that makes it much harder to build a democratic country. I want to thank all of you who are making access to learning and growth possible through your work,”
— Tetiana Vakulenko, Head of the Ukrainian Center for Educational Quality Assessment
Two years of COVID-19 disruptions and school closures caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion have deeply affected the educational process and the development of human capital in Ukraine. In 2022, there was a clear need for scalable solutions that could provide effective, targeted academic support.
As a response, Teach for Ukraine NGO piloted its first small-scale tutoring initiative in April 2022, involving 50 students in 4 groups. By November 2022, the organization launched the large-scale Educational Soup online tutoring project in partnership with the World Bank and supported by UBS Optimus Foundation.
Over two years, three learning waves were conducted, reaching more than 7,000 students in grades 5–10. The project focused on math, Ukrainian language, and socio-emotional support — becoming Ukraine’s first and largest randomized controlled trial (RCT) in the education sector.
“The results of World Bank studies don’t just influence the countries where they’re conducted — they can shape global education policy. Since this kind of research has never been done in Ukraine before, we believe our findings could influence international efforts to combat learning losses and recognize the power of tutoring,”
— Diana Nazarenko, Program Operations Coordinator at Teach for Ukraine
The research results will be published soon on Teach for Ukraine’s platforms. The organization continues to advocate for high-impact, scalable solutions that help every child in Ukraine thrive — no matter where they live or learn.
