OECD Reviews of Integrity in Education: Ukraine 2017
Education in Ukraine is marked by integrity violations from early childhood education and care through postgraduate study. In the past decade policy makers and civic organisations have made progress in addressing these challenges. However, much remains to be done. OECD Reviews of Integrity in Education: Ukraine 2017 aims to support these efforts.
The review examines systemic integrity violations in Ukraine. These include: preferential access to school and pre-school education through favours and bribes; misappropriation of parental contributions to schools; undue recognition of learning achievement in schools; paid supplementary tutoring by classroom teachers; textbook procurement fraud; and, in higher education, corrupt access, academic dishonesty, and unwarranted recognition of academic work.
The report identifies how policy shortcomings create incentives for misconduct and provide opportunities for educators and students to act on these incentives. It presents recommendations to address these weaknesses and strengthen public trust in a merit-based education system. The audience of this report is policy makers, opinion leaders and educators in Ukraine.
Misappropriation of parental contributions to schools and pre-schools in Ukraine
This chapter examines parental donations to schools and pre-schools, an important source of education financing in Ukraine in which 90% of parents with school children report they have participated. Parental donations to schools are at high risk of misuse through fraudulent invoicing, which permits the difference between misstated and actual prices to be captured for personal benefit. This risk arises from strong incentives for education providers to bypass formal requirements for management of parental donations – combined with weak budget oversight of schools, and the absence of a parental right to require an account of how school funds are used. The chapter recommends expanding the legal rights of parents to oversee how donations are managed and used; improving the transparency of budget allocations and strengthening internal audit on local level of governance; strengthening the role and capacity of the School Inspectorate to reduce opportunities for misappropriation; and widening opportunities for schools to make flexible use of extra-budgetary resources from parental contributions.