First time in grade 12: how the high school reform is explained
School is a universal experience that unites us all. It includes hours at the kitchen table working on homework, parental chats, and worrying about their children and what they will become after graduation.
The Ministry of Education and Science is currently implementing a school reform in Ukraine that will give students more space and choice of future professions: in 2027, tenth graders will go to a new high school where they will be able to choose what they want to study freely.
To increase the visibility of the reform, plusone social impact developed and launched the brand of the high school reform, which explains the key school innovations that almost every generation of Ukrainians has dreamed of.
Communication tasks and challenges
The brand and communication of the high school reform are built around the most important change that the renovated high school will bring – soon children, together with their parents, will be able to choose what they study. The reform is a necessity to better adapt to the needs of modern children and give them more opportunities to develop in their chosen fields.
The first step was to ensure that prospective students and their parents knew about this opportunity. The second step was understanding how the selection mechanism works and what depends on it. This is what the high school reform communication is based on.
The agency decided to focus the branding of the reform on the values and opportunities it brings to students: better education, more freedom for them, and confidence for parents in their children’s future, which can be seriously planned as early as grades 10-12. This approach also makes it easier to prepare for the changes themselves, which are often met with natural resistance because it is not always easy to adapt to new ways of doing things.
Parents have become a key audience for communication, as they help their children make important decisions. We decided to show the reform through the prism of teenagers’ stories, as they will be the first to experience the school changes firsthand.
The emotional manifesto video tells about the hobbies of schoolchildren that will be able to be further developed with the reform: from love of learning languages, and physical experiments to a real talent for repairing complex mechanisms. In this way, parents will be able to recognize their children in the portraits – with their talents, passion, and thirst for learning.
Easy communication – easy adaptation to the reform
Any reform requires feedback and constant communication to make changes easier to accept and implement. To this end, the high school reform uses dialogue as the main element of communication, primarily between the ministry and the community of parents. In this way, the agency decided to demonstrate the ministry’s “healthy person” approach, where there is openness and mutual understanding instead of top-down rules. The dialogue is embodied in all components of the campaign: from the identity, banners, and posts on social media to the landing page of the Ministry of Education’s website, where you can find answers to the most common questions about the innovations.
“Our many years of experience in communicating reforms in Ukraine show that the more people support reform, the more chances it has for successful implementation. This is because the authorities implementing it often rely on the opinion of the audience in their actions. And if they see support, they act more decisively and quickly. The high school reform applies to a large segment of Ukrainians, as school is present in the lives of literally every family, student, and parent. In addition, the reform brings truly dramatic positive changes to their lives. That’s why we used this approach: by explaining the reform to the audience, we increased the level of support for it among Ukrainians. And this will help the reform providers to act more boldly,” says Georgiy Arabuli, plusone social impact agency strategist.
A community that supports the reform is a key lever that will drive change forward. Building trust between the system and parents will help implement these innovations: teachers will know that the reform is receiving a positive response and will be more actively involved in the changes, and parents will see that the system is working effectively and benefiting their children. Such communication strengthens different sides of the same reform for a common goal – a better future for Ukrainian children.
