In early November, the Education Ombudsman and his Office will begin full-fledged operation. Education Ombudsman Serhii Horbachov announced at a meeting with Minister of Education and Science Hanna Novosad today, September 10, 2019, at the Ministry of Education and Science.

“I would like to offer you to summon regular meetings of the Education Ombudsman and the Minister to tackle the most common and pressing needs. It would also be nice if you send us every two weeks an aggregate array of common questions you receive. We would then be able to find a new approach to address these issues and clarify the situations. It is extremely important for us to know what bothers people and to seek for systematic approaches to solving their problems”, said Hanna Novosad.

Serhii Horbachov added that his Office plans to do monthly analytics on citizens' appeals.

“We will do analytics every month about what appeals were received, what topics, what solutions were offered by the Office of the Education Ombudsman. And here is a related issue - building up cooperation with the Ministry, with the State Service of Education Quality. We have already had a meeting with the National Police, they propose to elaborate a memorandum of cooperation between the Education Ombudsman and the police or juvenile prevention as our problems overlap. We are also planning a meeting with Presidential Commissioner for Child Rights Mykola Kuleba. We are extremely interested in ensuring that the interaction among all institutions responsible for these issues is coordinated and that the response is rapid”, the Education Ombudsman explained.

He noted that by November, his Office needed to develop a lot of internal procedures, to work out algorithms for handling appeals, because in fact all those are lacking now.

“We are now moving in line with the planned schedule, meeting all deadlines. In particular, we approve the staff schedule. We will have 5 specialists in the legal department, there will be a sector of work with appeals, a sector of regulatory legal work. We have already started work on the proposals for the draft law "On comprehensive general secondary education". There are things and problems that can be solved only by establishing new rules of interaction in the education system, which is why we consider proposals for laws and regulations as one of the most important issues for us”, said Serhii Horbachov.

Hanna Novosad also supported his proposal to include Educational Ombudsman in the mandatory list of members of the MES Board.