Anna Novosad: Ukraine’s youngest minister aims to reboot education

Age: 29
Education: B.A. in political science and government from the National Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, M.A. in European Studies from Maastricht University, the Netherlands
Profession: Minister of education and science
Did you know? Novosad swam across the Bosphorus in a cross-continental race in Istanbul

Editor’s Note: This profile has been written based upon Novosad’s previous interviews with Ukrainian media. She did not respond to the Kyiv Post’s request.

Anna Novosad entered her first job at Ukraine’s ministry of education and science in 2014, fresh out of graduate school in the Netherlands. Less than six years later, she took the helm of the ministry, aiming to reshape the cumbersome system of post-Soviet education to the demands of the modern world.

Novosad’s rapid career growth owes much to President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose party won the majority of seats in the parliament. Novosad was on the list of elected lawmakers, and Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk nominated her for education minister in his newly-formed cabinet.

Novosad is one of the two youngest ministers in the government, but she is far from a newbie in her field. Her mission, she says, is to continue what her predecessor and former boss, Liliya Hrynevych, started.

Reforms in education take time to yield results and have to be consistent and incremental, she said in an October interview with Novoye Vremya.

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Under Hrynevych, Novosad led the department for European integration overseeing the EU-funded student exchange program Erasmus Plus and the research and innovation program Horizon 2020.

Hrynevych endorsed Novosad as her replacement, touting her “common sense and extremely professional approach to the issues.”

The New Ukrainian School is an ambitious 12-year reform launched in 2017. Initially, it aims to implement an innovative new teaching methodology in primary school.

There is a daunting list of long-standing classroom issues, especially in village schools: textbook shortages, low salaries for teachers, poor facilities, outdated equipment and more.

Later the reform will move to high schools, which should be career-oriented and prepare teenagers for the future profession of their choice, Novosad said.

“High school curriculums teach over 20 general education subjects. As a result, we have disoriented graduates who don’t know what they want to study and do for work. 20% of first-year university students say that they have chosen the wrong discipline,” Novosad said.

“Our goal is to give students an individual academic track starting from the tenth grade by allowing them to choose subjects and deepen their knowledge.”

Moreover, Novosad wants to address the gender gap in education.

“Our girls do well in math and many show good learning results. There are a lot of female applications to IT programs in universities. But if we look at employees of IT companies, women make up only 15%. We have to discuss why women are afraid to go in certain spheres and what we should do to fix that,” she said speaking at the Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv in September. “It often starts in kindergartens and schools.”

In her welcome address at the beginning of the new school year in September, which coincided with her first day in the new position, Novosad outlined her vision for Ukrainian education.

“I believe that only successful, professional and motivated teachers can educate successful and happy children. Our task is to make every Ukrainian child have access to such teachers,” she said.

“Ukrainian universities have to become places for producing new ideas and intellectual products.”