100% Free School Fees for displaced Ukrainian children offered by Premium UAE online school Minerva’s Virtual Academy

Premium British curriculum online school Minerva’s Virtual Academy, which has recently launched in the UAE, is offering free, full-time private education to teenagers displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The UK-based Minerva’s Virtual Academy says it will offer places at its Tier 1, British-curriculum online school free of charge for a number of young people between the ages of 13 and 15. School fees will be reduced by 100% so that no charge whatsoever is payable by distressed Ukrainian families with children fleeing to the UAE from Ukraine.

The school will make places available to 10 children from Ukraine – 5 in Year 9 and 5 in Year 10 – who will receive full-time teaching in up to nine subjects as well as one-to-one mentoring, wellbeing and, crucially, mental health support.

Stability in chaos

One month into the war and more than 3.8 million Ukrainians have fled to neighbouring countries, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of United Nations data.

They’re leaving a dire situation, in which millions of children caught in the conflict are sheltering in makeshift bunkers or the basements of public buildings, with 5.7 million Ukrainian boys and girls being denied an education due to nationwide school closures.

While nothing can fix the devastating practical, physical and emotional impact of war, school can at least offer a small sense of normality during a time of extreme chaos and upheaval.

Minerva’s Virtual Academy CEO Hugh Viney says:

“We have all been deeply saddened by the ongoing events in Ukraine and we felt compelled to do something to help.”

 

“School offers a sense of stability, something that the thousands of children who have been forced from their homes, away from everything that is familiar to them, simply don’t have. It’s not just about education; this sense of normality, in a time of such uncertainty, could be vital in helping these children to process something that no child should ever have to.”

“We hope that by offering these places, we can ensure that the children we are able to help are not left behind in their education and that we can offer a sense of familiarity and community that will help them to feel more settled in their home from home.”

Parents and members of the Minerva’s Virtual Academy community have been strongly supportive of the philanthropic endeavours of their children’s school. One parent commented:

“Can I say how amazing Minerva is to offer free places to Ukrainian children. I am so pleased our son is part of a school with such a compassionate and kind approach.”

Another parent wrote:

“What a fantastic thing to do – thank you for helping these poor kids coming from war-torn Ukraine.”

More needs to be done…

But, Mr Viney says, the support that individual organisations can offer is not enough on its own.

Although Minerva’s Virtual Academy is now operating in the UAE, it’s headquartered in the UK, and this is where its charitable efforts for Ukrainians were originally focused. Minerva’s Virtual Academy has since widened the criteria to include genuine Ukrainian refugee children who have visas to stay in the UAE.

The UAE is offering Ukrainians who arrived before March 3 2022 the ability to stay in the country for up to a year without fines, and those arriving post March 3 2022 will have 30 days of visa-free entry, as was the previous policy before the invasion.

In the UK, the government operates a “Homes for Ukraine” scheme – wherein British citizens, from across the United Kingdom, in an outpouring of compassion, are signing up in their tens of thousands to provide temporary accommodation for displaced Ukrainians in their own homes. Mr Viney argues that government support is needed, above that offered by individuals and organisations like Minerva’s Virtual Academy, to ensure that thousands of Ukrainian children don’t fall through the net. He adds that he hopes their call on the UK Government to provide financial support might eventually help schools like Minerva’s Virtual Academy offer more places.

Launched in January 2021, Minerva’s Virtual Academy is an online premium Tier 1 independent school which caters for 10 to 18-year-olds. The school delivers a British education to children across the world through GCSE to gold-standard A Level.

“At the moment, we have the capacity to offer these 10 places, but with financial support from the UK Government we, and other online schools like Minerva, could offer help to so many more children.

“Finding local school places for potentially tens of thousands of children is a lengthy and often complicated process which could lead to even more disruption for families who have already suffered so much.

Our model means that no matter where children are based, we can teach them without the boundaries of catchment areas or other geographical requirements.”

Minerva’s Virtual Academy already has a school filled with a diverse range of nationalities, with 19 countries of residence represented amongst its pupils. The majority of students are in the UK, but the second largest country of residence is Ukraine, from which there are 4 students, followed by 3 from Italy, 3 from China, 2 in France, 2 in Austria and 1 each from Portugal, Taiwan, USA, Congo, Dubai, Estonia, Ghana, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Poland, Russia, South Africa, South Korea.  Of the 4 Ukrainians currently studying with Minerva’s Virtual Academy, 3 have managed to flee Ukraine.

One child being helped by Minerva has been unable to flee Kyiv, but channels at the time of writing this story are still open and the family is safe.

More than just virtual lessons alone, Minerva offers many of the same elements as a bricks and mortar school, with weekly assemblies, after-school clubs and school trips to ensure that students are still very much part of a community, but with the added flexibility of learning from home.

Minerva’s Virtual Academy has already received applications for the free school spaces from students based in the UK and Poland. All enquiries regarding the school spaces in the UAE should be made to [email protected] and will be assessed on a case by case basis. All potential students must have a good level of English in order to be able to engage with the curriculum.

For more information on Minerva’s Virtual Academy, or for Ukrainian families looking for education support, visit www.minervavirtual.com

Are there other ways for displaced Ukrainian students to access education?

The escalation of hostilities in Ukraine is restricting access to education for the entire school-aged population, some 5.7M girls, boys and adolescents between 3-17 years of age, according to the Ukraine Education Cluster Secondary Data Review Report. Distance-learning tools, however, developed during the pandemic, have helped limit the need for physical learning spaces in refugee and internal displacement camps – and, positively, there are ongoing efforts to provide learning opportunities, reports non-profit news service Geneva Solutions.

The state school system’s online offering is the All-Ukrainian Online School, an initiative of Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation and Ministry of Education and Science.

Another education project deployed in Ukraine is UNICEF and Microsoft’s Learning Passport. The passport brings together a range of educational courses and is accessible online, through mobile phones, and offline too, making it possible for children to continue learning where there is damage to IT infrastructure, physical schooling is unsafe or schools have simply been bombed out of existence.

The Ukraine Education Cluster also lists the following private bodies that are offering some form of education:

a)Viber Community (“Schkola_Info” [School info]) which has initiated an online education initiative for the pupils of primary schools (Grades 1-4) to continue their education amid school disruption. Their daily school schedule includes lessons in Maths, Reading, Science, English Language, etc.

b) Gimnasium A+ (Akademia A+) – opened its schedule for online Zoom classes for all children in Ukraine as of March 2nd. They have daily schedule for pre-school, primary school (grades 1-4) and middle school (grades 5-9). They are working now on taking as many people as possible (Zoom limit is 100 people per meeting) and clearly much more than 100 students are willing to join.

c) Distance Education school “Optima” opened access to its education site for students all over Ukraine (grades 1-11) free of charge for 1 month (with consideration for extensions if required).

d) Mathematical platform CIOS opened its web-site for students and teachers until March 31st.

e) Web-sites “Osvitoria” and “New Ukrainian School” provide, resources, tips, online meetings and activities aimed at supporting children under current difficult circumstances, including communication about war, psychological support.

The SchoolsCompared View

Hope as bombs rage – UK’s Minerva’s Virtual Academy steps in to provide a free education to desperate children fleeing to the UAE from the horrors of war.

Covid-19 has seen a revolution in the provision of alternatives to traditional bricks and mortar education worldwide. With premium Tier 1 British curriculum schools, like Minerva’s Virtual Academy, now being established in the UAE, we are already seeing some of the unforeseen positive impacts of Covid-19 beginning to emerge as new investment in technology add to the choice of educational options for children and families.

Few, however, would have wanted a war to demonstrate perhaps the most profound benefit of all to date – the ability of online schools to ensure that even the most threatened children, fighting to survive in war zones, have their education protected, maintained and nurtured.

It is a credit to organisations, like Minerva’s Virtual Academy, as well as UAE individuals, families – and the UAE government, that the Ukrainian people, and children, at a time that they need all our help the most, are not being forgotten.

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