Britain officially apologized to Ukrainian child refugees: all the details

Great Britain has apologized to Ukrainian refugee children who were offered to take a Russian language exam in local schools due to the lack of a Ukrainian qualification. The British government will fund the development of a Ukrainian GCSE exam, which will become available in England in 2028 year. This is reported by Hlavkom with reference to The Guardian.

This happened after years of lobbying by the Ukrainian government and the Ukrainian community on behalf of more than 30 thousand Ukrainian children who fled to Great Britain. In a letter to the Ministry of Education in 2024 this year, the Kyiv Ministry of Education stated: “We are deeply concerned that, due to the absence of Ukrainian GCSE, many Ukrainian children are under pressure from school staff to take the Russian GCSE.”

Andriy Butenko, Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science, welcomed the British government’s decision. He stressed that the introduction of the exam was an important step in ensuring the right of Ukrainian children abroad to choose their native language for taking final exams.

“Today we have taken an important step toward introducing the GCSE in Ukrainian, which the Ukrainian community in Great Britain has been pursuing for years,” Butenko emphasized.

Butenko also thanked the British government and the schools for supporting Ukrainian children who, due to the full-scale war, were forced to leave their homeland.

Since the start of Russia’s full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine, British schools opened their doors to thousands of Ukrainian pupils, and we will always be grateful for this support. We welcome the next step by the British government to ensure educational freedom of choice for Ukrainian children and respect for their national identity,” emphasized Ukraine’s Minister of Education and Science.

Ukraine’s Minister of Education, Georgia Gould, announced the new educational qualification. According to her, many Ukrainian students found themselves in a situation where they were offered to take a Russian language exam due to the lack of a similar option for Ukrainian.

This concerns GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) – the British qualification for secondary education, which pupils typically obtain around 16 years after taking exams in various subjects. From now on, Ukrainian children will be able to choose their native language for such an exam and officially confirm their proficiency within the British education system.

The decision was announced during Georgia Gould’s visit to St. Mary’s School in west London. She is the center of a network of 13 Ukrainian-language schools in Great Britain. There, the minister met with Ukrainian students.

“So many students were forced to study Russian. I am very sorry that they found themselves in such a situation. It is very important that they have access to the Ukrainian GCSE,” Gould said.

Earlier, Hlavkom wrote that Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Valeriy Zaluzhny, announced the introduction of a Ukrainian language GCSE. He called this decision historic for the Ukrainian community in the country.

As a reminder, 24 in November 2025 this year, Hlavkom reported that Ukrainian children who moved to Great Britain due to the full-scale war were forced to take GCSE exams in Russian. In particular, schoolgirl Liuba said that the British school offered her to take the Russian exam, even though she wanted to choose German, which she studied in Ukraine. She said that preparing for the exam caused strong stress. Head of the Ukrainian school in London, Inna Hryhorovych, explained at the time that the Ukrainian community is demanding the introduction of the opportunity to take exams in their native language.