“You’ll be in a staff meeting and hear the air-raid sirens go off and immediately the meeting has to finish.”
David Cole, principal of the British International School Ukraine, is reflecting on the new reality he and his colleagues face in Kyiv and Dnipro as they try to continue education for the school’s pupils during the Russian invasion.
As you may imagine, it’s not a situation he ever envisaged having to deal with when he took up the posting - but air-raid sirens, shelters, tanks and roadblocks are now very much part of the everyday reality.
“Our health and safety now includes setting up air-raid shelters,” he tells Tes during an interview for the latest International podcast (click on the link below to listen).
“Now, you know, six months ago, if you just said, ‘Oh, by the way, you need to set up an air-raid shelter,’ you’d think, ‘Are you joking?’ - but it is the new normal.”
These shelters are being constructed in part so that schools - both international and state - will be able to ensure that learning can continue - as close to normal as possible - from the 1 September reopening. They can move lessons to structures that offer more protection than a classroom.
This does not quite mean that lessons will continue while missiles rain down - instead, it means pupils can learn in extra safety during an air-raid warning.
“What the government will do if they know that an area is being attacked [is] the whole area gets a warning - and these warnings can go on for quite a time until the all-clear is given,” Cole explains.
“So when we’re looking at the air-raid shelters, it’s not just a question of getting children so they can sit somewhere, it’s also so that learning and teaching will continue.”
War in Ukraine: keeping schools running
Teaching in a temporary air-raid shelter is perhaps something that we never expected to see again in Europe after 1945.
Indeed, many world leaders found the prospect of a full-scale land invasion in Europe so hard to believe that they failed to heed the warnings in January and February that war was looming.
Cole admits that this same attitude affected some of the plans made by the school and staff at the start of the year.
“As the warnings intensified, we talked to staff and advised them to give us as much information as possible about any evacuation arrangements they were making, and a number of staff said, naively - although none of us thought it at the time - ‘I’ll fly out.’
“Because…I think, if we put our minds back to the time, it was thought maybe it would be an extension of what was happening in the Donbas [where there has been fighting since 2014] but it won’t actually affect Kyiv or the rest of Ukraine. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.”
The extent of the invasion meant that coaches booked to help staff leave were not available once war had broken out.
Escaping from Kyiv as the Russian tanks got to within just a few kilometres of the capital involved using whatever means possible, from minibuses arranged by the school’s CEO to 18-hour train trips across the country to the far west.
“We’ve got some students who’ve actually joined the military”
As staff fled or sought refuge, it meant there were some hugely stressful moments, not knowing if people were safe from the fighting.
“Some staff …we’d lose contact with them because maybe they were in an area that was being bombed and they’d gone down to air-raid shelters where the internet wasn’t available to them. And those were really trying times, wondering where the person was and hoping for the best. They were long days,” says Cole.
“However, the joy when you found out somebody was safe - absolutely wonderful. I mean, it made such a difference.”
Thankfully, the school’s international staff were all able to escape the fighting and get themselves to a place of safety.
This, of course, meant that the school community was soon scattered around the world.
“At one point we had staff and students in six different time continents, we had colleagues in Australia, in America, across time zones,” Cole says.
‘As normal as possible’
However, despite this, the school moved quickly to try to get remote teaching and learning up and running again.
“We had to respect the fact that [staff] may have moved to one place that was temporary and were moving again, but they were phenomenal in terms of providing cover, providing support,” says Cole.
The school re-established many of its pandemic-inspired ways of working, using video conferencing and remote lessons.
Of course, with the disruption caused, Cole admits that they had to “change some of the formats” of the lessons and understand that it was not possible for staff to be available at all times.
However, he says parents were understanding about this and appreciated the attempts made to provide lessons as standard.
The biggest impact, though, was on the pupils. Cole says that although staff did not try to hide what was happening from the children, they felt it was important that school continued as close to normal as possible.
“We made ourselves available if students wanted to talk, so we had our educational psychologist available and teachers were ready - but we tried to provide what was effectively as normal a day as possible,” he explains.
“One of the best successes we had in achieving this was when, in our primary assembly, the students, through student voice, said, ‘Can we have star of the week reinstated?’
[That] was a massive success, to have our children focusing on their learning, rather than on some of the terrible things that they’ve experienced or they were hearing, was a massive achievement.”
Remote learning will likely continue for many pupils come 1 September - but for others, the start of the new term will herald a return to in-person learning.
Staff affected by the conflict
Of course, many families, understandably, will be wary about returning to a country at war and Cole says he knows that making a decision about returning will not be easy. So the school is preparing to provide a flexible education model to its community.
“We’re working through the summer to make sure we’re available if people have questions, [to] keep that communication going. We will provide lessons if you can come to school physically, and then we will provide online.”
Those who do return to the school will find it a very different place - one physically unscathed by war but different emotionally and in terms of personnel, with some staff and students now signed up and fighting in the military.
“We’ve got some students who’ve actually joined the military,” says Cole. “We’ve got members of our staff team who have joined the military. And many of our staff are also working as volunteers in support in the military.”
So far fatalities have not occurred within the school community. Cole instinctively puts his hand on his desk as he utters: “Touch every piece of wood there is, we’ve not had any fatalities among the staff team.”
Sadly, though, the fighting has touched the community in other ways. “One of our cleaners… her son was killed in the east, which is just awful,” says Cole.
What’s more, while the fighting in Kyiv has subsided since the early days of the war, the school has another site in Dnipro that remains far closer to the frontline, and where local staff are living daily with the ever-present danger of war.
“We’ve got colleagues in Dnipro, which is in the south east, much closer to the fighting, and so you’re always worried. You’ll be in [an online] staff meeting and hear the air-raid sirens go off and immediately the meeting has to finish,” says Cole.
“And your mind goes, ‘I know I’ll see them, I definitely will see them…,’ but the worry will still be there. There’s no escaping it.”
Preparing the next generation
Worrying about colleagues as air-raid sirens blare out is not a situation many headteachers ever expect to face - and Cole admits that the past six months have been “probably the greatest challenge I’ve ever undertaken” and one that he is quick to acknowledge he could not have navigated alone.
“As a school leader, it definitely is not something you could ever do on your own,” he says.
“I’m blessed in the fact that we’ve got great heads of school, great deputies, directors, a wonderful CEO, wonderful chair, a brilliant staff team and students and parents….it was a collaborative effort in so many things we did [and] I would say that the school has been successful because of that team spirit that we managed to maintain.”
He notes, too, that wider support - from international schools across Europe, from the Council of British International Schools and MPs in the UK who have raised the plight of education in Ukraine - has been invaluable at this time as well. “[It’s] all made a difference,” he adds.
While the war rages on, Cole is confident it will “end in a Ukraine victory”. As such, he says he believes it is vital that his school - as well as every other school in the nation - helps to play its part by ensuring that the next generation can help the country prosper long into the future.
“It’s absolutely crucial that learning continues, because the children that are in school now will be that next generation,” he says.
You can listen to the full interview above or on your podcast platform of choice, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Amazon.
