More Than 14,000 People Reached and New Opportunities for Schools: Key Results of the School Up Project by East SOS

More than four years into russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine have meant interrupted education, damaged and destroyed infrastructure, and constant adaptation to new challenges. For relocated and frontline schools, this means keeping education going under difficult conditions and finding additional resources, learning new tools, and creating opportunities for children and hromadas.

From January 2025 to August 2026, the East SOS education team implemented the School Up project to strengthen the capacity of educators and school staff. During this period, the project reached nearly 14,000 people, including educators, pupils, members of school staff, and hromada residents. The project focused on project management, digital competencies, information hygiene, and cybersecurity.

During the project, the team:

• held a two-day training for mentors and jointly developed a methodology for working with school staff;
  
• organized two project management boot camps in Kyiv and Lviv, bringing together teacher and pupil teams from 15 frontline and border-area schools;
  
• provided school staff with mentoring support as they developed and implemented their own projects;
  
• supported the implementation of ten school projects (in 2025 and 2026) in hromadas across Chernihiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, and Mykolaiv oblasts, and supported a school from Donetsk Oblast that was relocated to Dnipro due to the war;
  
• provided 15 educational institutions with goods and services to strengthen their capacity, worth a total of UAH 2,837,305.48;
  
• conducted three monitoring visits to participating schools to track progress in project implementation;
  
• held a webinar on strategic project planning for ten school teams;
  
• prepared the Teacher’s Digital Competence handbook;
  
• held a five-day training in Lviv on digital competencies, cybersecurity, and information hygiene for educators working online in schools from temporarily occupied territories;
  
• supported a series of webinars on digital competencies for 363 educators from schools in temporarily occupied territories.
  The training was delivered by colleagues who had previously completed training as part of the project;
  
• provided first aid training at five frontline schools.

“After the training, the teams began looking for new opportunities on their own, submitting project proposals, mobilizing resources, and involving students in the process. For us, this is one of the most key indicators of the School Up project: the knowledge gained stays within the school and helps teams develop new solutions for their hromadas,” said Anna Kior, Education Programs Manager at East SOS.

The School Up project phase has come to an end, but the work of the school teams continues. The knowledge they gained, the initiatives they implemented, and the new partnerships they built will remain in their hromadas and serve as a foundation for future projects.

The East SOS team continues to support educators who work every day to find new opportunities for their schools and hromadas in wartime.

Since 2016, we have worked with educators, pupils, hromadas, and local authorities. Since the beginning of russia’s full-scale invasion, we have helped create safe educational environments; develop digital competencies and first aid skills; strengthen psychological and psychosocial support for children and youth; and build project management skills so that teams can independently grow their hromadas. We also organize summer camps to help students catch up on learning lost due to the war.

The project “Strengthening the Capacities of Frontline and Relocated Schools in Ukraine/SCHOOL UP” is implemented by East SOS in partnership with the Danish Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, with support from CISU.