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A letter from Moscow Architects and educators from across the world have been grappling with the pandemic fallout. The future of school buildings and the curriculum itself is on the agenda from Minneapolis to Minsk. Ksenia Dokukina from the online magazine EdDesign in Moscow reports on the situation in Russia. There are over 40,000 schools and 16.6 million schoolchildren in Russia, a number that is expected to rise to 19 million in the coming years. Almost all children go to state schools and only 1 per cent attends private institutions, making Russia a global outlier. But pandemic-induced distance learning has highlighted many weaknesses in the Russian education system, which may explain the increased availability and quality of private educational online content. Emerging hybrid forms of education suggest how the future of schools might look.
“Modern education is moving out of classrooms into nature, museums, parks and research centres.”
Last year, the Russian edtech sector grew by more than a third. Alexander Laryanovsky, executive partner of Skyeng online school, one of the top three players in the online education market, observes that “more than a quarter of the entire volume (£141 million/€166 million) is from extracurricular online education”. He expects that by 2023 this figure will be around £380 million (€450 million).
