Air raid alerts and attacks on schools: the devastating face of education in Ukraine

Since the start of the academic year, “children have experienced an average of 34 hours of air raid alarms during school time, equivalent to more than 13 per cent of scheduled learning” up to 20 October, with some regions impacted by 60-plus hours of alerts, said UNICEF spokesperson Ricardo Pires.

Meanwhile, the UN’s top aid official in Ukraine condemned Monday’s attack on a school and shelter in Komyshuvakha, Zaporizhzhia region, that reportedly killed at least 29 civilians.

The majority of the victims were residents “who came to get aid at a local school and employees of the local administration”, said Matthias Schmale, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine. “Subsequent strikes at the same location killed two rescuers and four police staff who responded to the first attack,” he continued, noting that nearly 50 people are still missing.

Learning under sirens

In Kyiv, aid raid alarms increased from 12 in September 2025 to 71 in September 2026. In Dnipropetrovsk, Kirovohrad and Kharkiv regions, children have experienced more than 60 hours of school-time alarms. This is equivalent to approximately one quarter of scheduled learning hours, affecting more than 560,000 children.

“I’ve just returned to in-person school; however, we still spend most of our school day in a shelter because of air raids,” said 15-year-old Katia from the Mykolaiv region, whose testimony Mr. Pires shared.

He reiterated the visible mental health toll that the war continues to have on all Ukrainian children, recalling his visit a month ago where he talked to youngsters who have to learn underground “because it’s not safe for them to be above ground”.

Despite the relative safety afforded by the classroom bunkers, “even then, they are dealing with air raid alarms all the time (and) you could feel that some of them, especially the older ones, expressed a lot of anxiety and shared with us their inability to fully concentrate and kind of leave what’s happening above ground.”

Toll on children everywhere

Echoing those concerns, the head of the UN global fund Education Cannot Wait, Maysa Jabout, explained that the “huge impact” of war everywhere on children has forced it to prioritise funding for psychosocial counselling, “carving away … “essential money that we need for teaching and learning in order to support children’s ability to cope with learning in very difficult circumstances”.