Ukrainian children who fled Russia’s full-scale invasion arrived in Britain and found that, if they wanted to take a GCSE in a language from home, schools could steer them toward Russian. There was no Ukrainian GCSE, and some pupils were pushed to sit an exam in the language of the nation that had forced them from their homes.
The Minister’s Apology
Schools minister Georgia Gould has apologised to those children. “So many students were pushed into having to do Russian,” she said, adding that she was sorry they had been put in that position. Pupils described the suggestion as insulting. Ukrainian and Russian are different languages, and these were children displaced by Russia’s invasion, so the reaction is justified.
The failure was not that schools lacked a convenient timetable slot. England’s exam system offered a Russian qualification but no Ukrainian equivalent, then left refugee children to deal with the consequences. An exam board’s reluctance to develop a qualification for a relatively small group of students was allowed to outweigh what those students were actually being asked to do.
What Changes Now
The Department for Education is providing £340,000 for exam board AQA to develop a Ukrainian GCSE, with the qualification due to be ready in England in 2028. That will let future pupils study and be examined in Ukrainian instead of being directed to Russian as a substitute.
This decision follows years of lobbying by Ukraine’s government and Ukrainian community groups in Britain. They were speaking up for more than 30,000 Ukrainian children who fled to the UK after 2022. Kyiv’s education ministry warned the department in 2024 that, without a Ukrainian GCSE, school staff were pressuring children to take Russian.
The apology matters because a minister has acknowledged what happened to those pupils.
The funding can change the exam options. But a 2028 launch also means the children pushed toward Russian have already passed years inside a system that made their own language unavailable.