Education for Ukrainian refugees

How the online Ukraine School ensures “no child is left behind”

I was in Dubai when the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened. I own a development company there and have teams of people I have worked with in Ukraine for the past fifteen years, and who I deeply care about. So, I flew up to Bucharest to see how we could help.

Apart from the obvious of renting hotel rooms and sending food trucks to the borders, I was trying to think how we could help daily.

It was a 4am in the morning idea when I thought, if we use our eSchools platform, that operates in 1100 schools in the UK and Ireland, and reskin it as a Virtual School to connect children and their parents displaced by the war with their teachers, then we could educate them remotely in their own language and connect them back to their school in their school’s language.

Here in the UK, children are entering schools with no English. Ukraine School is available in 50 languages so a child can work in their language and then convert it to English for teachers to engage. We manage their homework, activities, calendar, blogs, projects and class discussions. It allows them to connect with other Ukrainian students and new friends to start building their own safe community.

Our motto at eSchools is that “no child is left behind,” so Ukraine School can assist across Europe as well. Teachers can mail us at hello@ ukraineschool. com and we’ll add their new pupils. Parents can download the eSchools App, click on Ukraine School, and that will connect them with their child’s school. Our amazing teams at eSchools have worked for the past few weeks getting it ready to go to market. We started to sign off our first schools two weeks ago. The response has been pretty incredible. We’re signing up schools from Mexico to Finland. Everywhere refugees are landing.

Ukraine School is free of charge so there’s no cost to the student, parent, or school. I hope we can help in our own small way through education.

It’s wonderful to see Ukrainian people on the platform and using it daily. It’s hard to comprehend what’s happened to them in the past few weeks, so we’ll do whatever we can to help them get through it and set up a new life here in the UK. I think everyone wants to help, we just have to provide the correct solutions to let them assist.

BRENDAN MORRISSEY,

Tech entrepreneur and Founder of Ukraine School

www.ukraineschool.com