A Ukrainian refugee has been forced to drop out of sixth-form college after she said she was put under pressure to study Russian.
Kateryna Endeberia moved to Stoke-on-Trent after fleeing Ukraine in 2022, after the start of Russia’s invasion.
She took her GCSEs at The Excel Academy in 2023 before completing a foundation year at City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College (SFC) and then studying economics, politics and statistics for one year.
But the 19-year-old said that when she ran into difficulty with her subjects, teachers tried to persuade her to study Russian instead.
As her father is a Ukrainian soldier, she felt this would be a traumatising experience, and that the request was “hurtful and insensitive” and akin to “discrimination and racism”.
Endeberia has since dropped out of SFC, and is instead studying at home using notes shared by friends. She has applied to sit A-level exams as a private candidate in 2026, at a cost of £1,400.
She told the Guardian that studying Russian was “against my personal principle because I was born [in Donetsk] where the war started in 2014. It’s not a language I want to speak or study because my father became a soldier last year”.
She added: “I am truly grateful for the opportunity to study in the United Kingdom – it feels like my third home [after Ukraine and the Czech Republic, where she initially moved]. But not everyone realises how challenging it can be for Ukrainian students to adapt to a new education system, culture and language after everything our country has gone through.”
Endeberia said she struggled on her A-level courses and felt she was being bullied because of her accent. She claims the college did not provide her with extra support but instead tried to persuade her to take up A-level Russian.
“Rather than offering empathy or help, they continued to insist that I change subjects. No one tried to understand how painful this experience was for me,” she said.
She said she had struggled to obtain “clear answers” about why she has been prevented from pursuing politics, economics and statistics, and is pursuing a complaints process through Potteries Educational Trust, which oversees SFC. She plans to escalate the case to Ofsted once this is completed.
A spokesperson for City of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College said: “The college cares deeply about our students and every effort is made to resolve issues and complaints in accordance with our complaints and resolution process. We do not comment on individuals for reasons of confidentiality.”
Ukraine has previously lobbied the UK government to give teenage refugees the chance to study a GCSE in Ukrainian, amid reports they are instead being pressed to study Russian because many can already speak some of the language.
Ukraine’s education minister, Oksen Lisovyi, met the UK education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, in December 2024 to warn that being taught Russian could retraumatise about 27,000 displaced Ukrainian children in the UK who have fled Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
The children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, has also urged the government to reintroduce a GCSE in Ukrainian.
AQA has said it is considering developing a GCSE in the Ukrainian language, however it is understood that this could take a couple of years.
