Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine and Palantir Partner to Create Safe Conditions for In-Person Education in Schools

The Ministry of Education and Science, along with Palantir (NYSE:PLTR), a leading provider of AI systems, have signed an agreement. The main goal is to facilitate qualitative transformations in the field of education and ensure the maximum number of children have access to safe in-person learning.

The agreement, initially for 12 months, will support the Government’s official School Offline initiative which aims to provide 300,000 more Ukrainian pupils with safe access to a school. New software tooling will enable:

• Funding allocated for school bomb shelters to be targeted where it will deliver the greatest benefit for children and young people of a school age.
• Every school to receive a risk rating according to a methodology recently adopted in law as a Cabinet of Ministers decree, in order to help identify targeted measures that will improve the safety of a school. The rating will take into account factors such as historic shelling in the area, presence of a bomb shelter, safety of access and missile defense systems.

The 100 percent off-line initiative is a response to the sharp increase in the number of children and young people in Ukraine who are being educated online since Russia’s illegal full-scale invasion. Research estimates that more than 40 percent of children in Ukraine are relying on online or hybrid learning due to the war. It has caused educational losses, thus according to the PISA-2022 international education quality survey, Ukrainian students lag behind the required level by 1.5 to 2.5 years of study.

These new tools are part of a wider suite of software support which will also enable:

• Analysis of educational and financial data, as well as the current model of the education system, to transform Soviet-era educational institutions into modern innovative spaces based on this data;
• Assessment of the security situation in communities to create all necessary conditions for in-person learning for children;
• Analysis of children's academic achievements, their correlation with the security situation, and other factors to make further management decisions regarding the transformation of the Ukrainian education system as a whole and individual educational institutions;
• Provision of innovative technologies, including artificial intelligence, as well as analytical tools and models for making effective management decisions by educational institutions, communities, local self-government bodies, and directly by the Government;
• Modeling a support network for Ukrainian children who are forcibly staying abroad through the integration of a Ukrainian studies component in selected educational institutions that provide quality educational services in a distance learning format.

Dmytro Zavgorodnii, Deputy Minister of Education and Science of Ukraine for digital development, digital transformations and digitalization, said: “Palantir technologies will provide us with innovative tools for creating policies based on a data-driven approach. Thus, it will help us make effective management decisions in the field of educational policies. The Ministry of Education and Science has diligently collaborated with Palantir, harnessing its cutting-edge technologies to devise an innovative approach and formulate a comprehensive methodology for assessing war-related risk levels within different regions of the education system for restoration of access to offline and secure education at schools.”