On April 20, 2023, the All-Ukrainian Round Table “Ensuring and implementing the rights of children to out-of-school education under military conditions” was held in Kyiv. The event was initiated by the International Association of After-School Education (IAASE) with the participation of representatives of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Education, Science and Innovation, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine, the State Education Quality Service of Ukraine, the National Pedagogical Drahomanov University, heads of education authorities, the military and the public.

The purpose of the event was to discuss the main issues of ensuring and realizing children’s rights to out-of-school education, as well as the activities of out-of-school educational institutions in wartime.

Special attention was paid to the discussion of problematic issues of out-of-school education under martial law, in particular:

• features of the normative legal provision of out-of-school education and activities of out-of-school education institutions;
• regional support for out-of-school education in order to improve the situation in ensuring equal access to out-of-school education for students;
• coverage of students and trainees with the military-patriotic direction of out-of-school education;
• teachers’ downtime and deterioration of staffing of the out-of-school education system;
• improvement of the content and methods of organizing the educational process in out-of-school education institutions on the basis of Ukrainian national and civic identity;
• losses in educational infrastructure, reorganization of out-of-school education institutions, insufficient financial and logistical support.

The roundtable was attended by the Acting Director of the SSI “Institute of Educational Analytics”, Doctor of Economics, Professor Sergiy Londar. During his speech, Sergiy Londar presented the information aspects of ensuring the functioning of out-of-school education in Ukraine. It was shown that the decrease in the number of out-of-school education students in Ukraine is due to the regions in which hostilities are taking place. However, there are also remote regions where such trends are intensifying. It is also shown that more work is needed to raise the prestige of teaching staff engaged in extra-curricular education. Along with that, there is a clear trend towards a relative decline in the number of workers under 30.

Within the framework of the round table, the Concept of Out-of-School Education under martial law was also presented. Proposals and additions were made to the draft Concept, aimed primarily at the successful implementation of the norms and provisions of this document.