The first stage of the reform started with primary school in 2018. The NUS steering committee consisting of the British Council in Ukraine, the Goethe Institute, and the Embassy of France in Ukraine developed a training programme ‘Teaching in New Context: grades 1 – 2’ for Modern language teachers from across the country.
The project started from 100 Ukrainian schools with 200 English teachers participating in it. EFL methodologists from 25 in-service teacher training institutions took part in it as well. The main aim of the training programmes is to help teachers improve their skills of teaching and to support teachers in their regions who start teaching in primary school in the reform context. These teachers have also completed an online course Communicative English Language Teaching in the Primary School provided by the Cambridge colleagues in Ukraine.
During the first stage of the project, a cohort of 195 English teachers has been trained as Change Agents. They trained 17,000 (out of 33,000) English teachers from all regions of Ukraine who started teaching English in grade 1 in 2018.