School graduates will no longer receive gold and silver medals for academic success.
This is stated in the order of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine.
Instead of medals, the certificate will state: "On obtaining a complete general secondary education with distinction".
The official designations will also change: instead of "GM" (gold medal) and "SМ" (silver medal), "WD" (with distinction) will be used. At the same time, this entry was already valid in previous documents on education.
What preceded
At a meeting on September 11, the Committee on Education, Science and Innovation of the Verkhovna Rada recognized the inexpediency of further centralized production of gold and silver medals at the expense of the state budget of Ukraine and awarding them to schoolchildren.
Then, the MP and committee member Natalia Pipa stated that for 2025, there was a request to allocate 4.6 million hryvnias from the state budget for gold medals and over a million hryvnias for silver medals.
According to the “Prozorro” website, the State Enterprise "Inforesurs" had the following orders in previous years:
- in 2023, 21 300 school medals (16 700 gold and 4 600 silver) were produced for the amount of 1 868 950 hryvnias;
- In 2022, 20 600 medals were produced for graduates (15 900 gold and 4 700 silver) for 1 771 050 hryvnias.
The question of the appropriateness of school medals was raised earlier on the website of the educational ombudsman. The average cost of manufacturing medals in 2023 was 87 hryvnias, in 2022 — 86, and in 2020 — 77. That is, in three years the price has increased by 10 hryvnias. And although the price for the manufacture of each individual medal seems insignificant, in total over the past two years it has cost more than a million budget funds, the website said.
Pipa said that over the past five years, more than 66 thousand medals have been produced in Ukraine. And in 2024, twice as many were produced as in 2020, while, the MP emphasizes, the level of knowledge of schoolchildren and the number of students have decreased.
According to her,the number of medals does not reflect the quality of education, and in general it is an “outdated practice” that is widespread only in post-Soviet countries. At the meeting of the Committee, the Educational Ombudsman Service noted that there is no such experience in Europe and the rest of the world. And after the abolition of centralized production of medals in Ukraine, each educational institution will be able to independently apply any incentives for students.
Currently, the law "On Complete General Secondary Education" stipulates that educational institutions must independently determine how to encourage and recognize students. It will remain so, just without spending money from the state budget specifically on medals.
Medals do not provide graduates with any advantages when entering a higher education institution — they are only moral encouragement for students and parents.
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