Online lessons to be offered to Ukrainian refugee pupils coming to UK, Education Secretary announces
Online lessons will be made available to 100,000 refugee pupils as they transition to life in the UK, Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi has announced.
Oak National Academy, an online classroom and resource hub, has rolled out an auto-translate function across all 10,000 of its online lessons.
In the online classroom, pupils will be able to access quizzes, video lessons with translated subtitles and worksheets.
The lessons will be translated into Ukrainian or Russian, as some refugee pupils will speak Russian as a first language.
“This will allow Ukrainian children arriving in the UK to access education in their native language as they transition into life and safety in the UK", Mr Zahawi said at the Association of School and College Leaders’ annual conference in Birmingham on Friday.
“We will continue to support Ukrainians in any way we can", he continued.
“I know schools are doing what they can to support their students make sense of what they are seeing.
“And we are working with schools to ensure that the tens of thousands of Ukrainian children we will welcome to our shores will have a place in our education system."
The UK will shortly welcome up to 200,000 Ukrainian refugees with a large number of them expected to be school-aged children, Oak National said.
“The prototype was brought forward following the invasion of Ukraine which has led to widespread school closures and displacement of hundreds of thousands of children internally and to neighbouring countries," it added.
Matt Hood, principal of Oak National Academy, said: “It is tragic that the lives of so many children have been blighted by this horrific invasion.
He added the new option to access lessons in Ukrainian "pales in comparison to the international effort needed to ensure the safety of families fleeing violence."
The automated translation meant the lessons would not “be perfect” and were not an attempt to align with the Ukrainian curriculum or to replace Ukraine’s own work providing remote education, Mr Hood said.
Mr Zahawi told the conference that the Ukrainian flag was flying over the Department for Education because it stood “shoulder to shoulder with all Ukrainians against the barbaric, criminal invasion of their sovereign democratic country”.
He added that it was “almost impossible to imagine the horror of what they are going through”.
“I came here many of you will know aged 11 unable to string a sentence of English together…even the thought of going to school was really scary,” he added.
“And if my teacher…hadn’t reminded me to funnel some of that creative, disruptive energy into something good, I certainly wouldn’t be here today."