General and extracurricular education transformation in the ex-Soviet countries

The Soviet system of out-of-school education was unparalleled in terms of its comprehensive characteristics, ensuring extensive coverage and high-quality services. It was widely regarded by foreign practitioners and researchers as an exemplary model for fostering personal, social, and professional skills. However, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the newly independent countries faced the dual challenge of integrating into the global educational agenda while formulating a national educational strategy within a new institutional landscape characterized by market competition, diverse stakeholders, and regulatory changes.

These countries also encountered significant socio-economic challenges that directly affected their education systems. As a result, the transformation of the unified Soviet model of out-of-school education commenced, involving changes in management and financing models, network structures, and content components. Examining the experiences and policies of the former Soviet republics enables us to reconstruct these transformative processes, identify commonalities, and highlight the unique aspects of their additional education systems. This exploration helps address key organizational and substantive issues and contributes to the effective development and functioning of the growing sector of additional education.

In the modern educational landscape, additional education occupies an increasingly vital position. It plays a significant role in the development of 21st-century skills and equipping the educational system with the necessary tools to respond to global challenges. Recognizing the importance of additional education in promoting educational and gender equality, preventing antisocial behavior, fostering identity formation, civic consciousness, and digital literacy further emphasizes the relevance of this study.

The project has been implemented since 2019 and includes cases from all 15 countries of the former USSR.

Project coordinator: Ivanov Ivan Yurievich iyivanov@hse.ru

Country cases (PDF, 1,16 Мб)

List of regulatory references (PDF, 162 Кб)

Additional information, including statistical data, is available upon request.

Since 2019, a research project has been underway to study the institutional transformation of the Soviet education system in the countries of the former USSR. A data corpus has been collected, which allows for an assessment of the overall situation of educational inequality, which has recently become a focal point of the research.

In 2021-2022, a project is being implemented to study educational inequality in the countries of the post-Soviet space. Within the project, a database has been created for the analysis of educational inequality in general and supplementary education in the post-Soviet space. Special attention is given to the characteristics of educational policy regarding school choice as a determining factor of educational inequality. A comparative analysis of educational policy in the post-Soviet countries is carried out through the development and implementation of two school choice indexes - the centralization index of regulation and the variability index of school choice mechanisms.

You can find more detailed info about the indexes here https://luck-spear-9ab.notion.site/45f477798e4045dfade7461ba6efea66.

The system of characteristics regulating school choice and its implementation, which was used to form the indexes, as well as the results of calculating country-level indexes and groups of countries based on types of national regulation of school choice, can be found in the attached file (PDF, 183 Кб).

Here you can download the dataset. https://data.mendeley.com/datasets/sz55gyhy6r/1 

For cite:

Anchikov, K., Ivanov, I., Zair-Bek, S. (2023), “School Choice Index”, Mendeley Data, V1, doi: 10.17632/sz55gyhy6r.1