The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine has approved a new List of fields and specialities. The List was updated to comply with the requirements of the Law of Ukraine «On Higher Education», as well as the recommendations of the European Commission on the harmonisation of the Ukrainian List with the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED). The government’s approval of this technical document is a step towards the integration of Ukrainian education into the European Higher Education Area, as well as an important element of the comprehensive transformation of the higher education system and its content.
In connection with Ukraine’s status as a candidate for accession to the European Union, our country is currently implementing a number of European legal norms and adapting domestic legislation to them. In particular, this involves the implementation of EU regulations on the collection, analysis and transmission of quality and comparable statistics on education and training to Eurostat/OECD/UNESCO.
Accession to the European statistics system requires restructuring the Ukrainian system of accounting for training. The previous List of branches of knowledge and specialities included 28 branches. The new one contains 10, which corresponds to ISCED, plus 1 «Security and defence», which corresponds to the special conditions which Ukraine is currently facing. This decision finally fulfilled the norm established by part three of Article 9 of the Law of Ukraine «On Higher Education» (adopted by the Verkhovna Rada in 2019) on the development of the List of fields of knowledge and specialities based on ISCED.
Moreover, the adoption of a new list of fields of knowledge and specialities is very timely now, given the planned revision of higher education standards that will begin in 2025 in connection with the adoption of the Law on Individual Educational Trajectories in May 2024 as part of the MES’s initiatives to transform the content of educational programmes at all levels of higher education and to regulate the requirements for regulated specialities. In order to introduce interdisciplinary educational programmes and improve the quality of the content of training in regulated specialities, the standards of higher education in specialities should be significantly updated. This work is now being intensified to enable admission to the updated study programmes as early as 2025.
In the near future, a table of correspondence between the 2015 List of Fields of Knowledge and Specialties and the new List adopted today will be prepared. A public discussion of this table in accordance with the new List of fields of knowledge and specialties will also be announced.