Estonia's large Russian-speaking minority used to be taught in Russian. The government has responded to Russia's invasion of Ukraine with a reform to end this. Now, lessons will only be taught in Estonian.
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00:00Victoria Boushinskaya sings in Estonian as best she can.
00:07The second grader belongs to Estonia's Russian-speaking minority.
00:16At Matra Comprehensive School in Tallinn, Victoria and her classmates learn all subjects
00:21in Estonian.
00:22Maths, too.
00:23Read, please.
00:24Six plus b equals ten.
00:38Think about what number you need to add to six to get ten as the answer.
00:49Good.
00:51Writing isn't difficult for me either.
00:57That's not a given, because Victoria only started learning Estonian at school.
01:05About 300,000 people in Estonia speak Russian as their mother tongue, a quarter of the population.
01:11A legacy of the Soviet Union, from which the Baltic state declared its independence in
01:161991.
01:18Estonian is most widely spoken in the capital Tallinn and in Narva, in the east on the border
01:23with Russia.
01:24Here, there's only a narrow river separating NATO and EU member Estonia from its giant
01:30neighbor.
01:34Until last year, Russian-speaking children in Estonia had their own schools and were
01:38taught in Russian.
01:40This is now a thing of the past.
01:42It's a reform that began more than 30 years ago, but was never consistently implemented.
01:49The government lacked the political will and was afraid of alienating Russian-speaking
01:54voters.
01:57One reason was that Russia intervened very actively on the issue.
02:03Every year it was declared a geopolitical issue.
02:07That could have destabilized Estonia considerably, which is why the reform was approached very
02:14cautiously.
02:21After the Russian attack on Ukraine, the Estonian government decided to ban Russian from schools
02:26and daycare centers in protest against the war.
02:30What seemed politically logical, however, proved difficult to implement.
02:35Most Russian-speaking children live largely isolated in prefabricated housing estates,
02:40such as Lasname, in the northeast of Tallinn.
02:44Almost everyone here can only speak Russian.
02:48Victoria is lucky that her mother understands Estonian.
02:51Yulia Bushinskaya is a sales assistant in an Estonian store.
02:56She can help Victoria with her homework, but that's the exception.
03:03Three children from our circle of friends are Victoria's age.
03:06One girl is two years older and in fourth grade.
03:09She has it hard.
03:11It's difficult for a lot of children because their parents can't help them with the language.
03:18Sometimes they ask me to translate their homework.
03:23We try to help each other as much as we can.
03:29There's no way around it because the education level is high.
03:34According to PISA studies, Estonian pupils are among the smartest in Europe.
03:38Globally, they rank fourth in math, just behind Singapore, Japan and South Korea.
03:44They also score highly in reading and science, but not all of them.
03:50Pupils' performance varies.
03:52The school and language reform wants to redress the situation.
03:58The level of education varies greatly in Estonia, between the rural schools on the
04:03one hand, the urban schools, and then the Russian-speaking schools.
04:12According to the latest PISA results, young people whose native language is Russian are
04:18well behind their Estonian-speaking peers.
04:24Our goal is to overcome this.
04:32Eight-year-old Viktoria comes from the Russian-speaking Tallinn district of Lasname, but she would
04:37like to study at an Estonian university one day.
04:40The school reform will help her to achieve this, she says.
04:47I'm spending most of my time learning Estonian.
04:51Viktoria enjoys it, and she knows she still has a lot to learn.