Ukrainian schoolchildren are preparing for the fall holidays of 2025, but this time the break looks different depending on the city and even the individual school. The Ministry of Education and Science recommends taking the fall holidays from October 27 to November 2, the winter holidays from December 27, 2025 to January 11, 2026, the spring holidays from March 23 to 29, 2026, and the summer holidays from June 1, 2026. The Ministry of Education and Science publishes these approximate dates as the basic schedule for the 2025/2026 academic year, but the final decision is made by the schools themselves through the pedagogical councils, taking into account the situation with security, energy, and shelters.
In Kyiv, the capital's authorities have confirmed that students will go on vacation on October 27 and return to their desks on November 3. During the break, schools and extracurricular institutions plan to leave clubs and thematic classes, so for parents this will not be a complete "disappearance of the child from the system," but rather a relief from lessons.
This year, Lviv has taken the path of maximum flexibility and stretched the autumn holidays in time. Some schools send children home from October 24–25, others from October 29–30, and there are also lyceums where the vacation period falls on the second half of November. That is, the city does not take a single date for everyone, but adjusts the calendar of each institution separately. This allows you to balance the academic load, save energy resources in specific buildings and maneuver with shelters. This approach directly follows from the autonomy of schools, which the Ministry of Education and Science established after the start of a full-scale war.
In Poltava region, the situation is even more variegated. Different communities have approved different dates: somewhere the holidays start on October 20 and end on the 26th, somewhere they last from October 25 to November 2, somewhere they are limited to only a few days at the end of October, and in some communities they are even postponed to the beginning of November. That is, the entire region formally studies according to one state standard, but lives according to several mini-calendars. Such a model gives communities the opportunity to adapt the schedule to real conditions - from school safety to the availability of heat. (This is a separate detail of wartime: directors increasingly often think not “when it is convenient according to the program”, but “when the building is able to survive in these conditions”.)
In the Kirovohrad region, schools are also not going in one wave. Some institutions close for vacation in the last decade of October, others - from October 27, and some - as early as November. There are gymnasiums where the autumn vacation will last until November 9. That is, children in one city can stay at home for almost two weeks, while across the street another school continues its studies at the same time. This shows how real the principle of "each principal has his own calendar" is now, and not "vacations for the entire region with one stroke of the pen."
The harshest decision this year was made in Odessa and part of the Odessa region. There, the autumn holidays in a number of schools were canceled altogether. The authorities explain this simply: there is a risk of a difficult winter of 2025/2026, including power outages, heating problems, and the possibility of prolonged air alarms. So schools are deliberately not taking a break in the fall in order to have a longer rest period in the winter and not lose school days at a time when it may be banally dark and cold in the classrooms. “We are preparing for a scenario when a normal process will be impossible in the winter, so we are working on it now,” the education department explains. The decision caused a contradictory reaction among parents, but the logic here is purely energy and safety: it is better to unlearn in October than to sit in jackets without light in December.
As a result, the country is entering the holidays without a single scenario. The Ministry of Education and Science names the base dates (October 27 - November 2), Kyiv adheres to this schedule, Lviv and Poltava regions "play" with dates within the autonomy, Kirovohrad region stretches the holidays until November, and in Odessa, on the contrary, they deliberately refuse the autumn holidays in order to save educational resources for the winter break.
Parents are advised to check the schedule not just “by region”, but specifically at their school, because even within the same city, the vacation dates may not coincide. This is no longer a formality or bureaucracy — in wartime realities, it is a matter of children’s safety, warmth in the building, and whether the school will actually be able to operate in the winter with possible long outages.
