The Czech Education Ministry will support Czech language courses for Ukrainian students for a second year, helping Ukrainian students gain access to Czech-language study programmes at Czech universities, the Ministry announced on its website today.
According to the subsidy tender issued by the ministry, three courses will operate, each of which should have a minimum of 660 teaching hours. Courses for 12 to 18 participants will run from 1 October this year until the end of August 2025. They are intended for Ukrainian refugees who are not enrolled in a Czech-language study programme and have expressed interest in such studies.
Participants of the course will receive a scholarship of CZK 16,000 per month, as long as they attend at least 70% of the classes in a calendar month.
Public universities that have provided language and vocational training for foreigners for at least 400 hours per semester between 2021 and 2023 can apply for subsidies to organise these courses. CZK 14 million has been earmarked for the project, the ministry said.
The programme is intended to support Ukrainians who have temporary visas or have been granted temporary protection in the Czech Republic in the next academic year. “This educational and social measure will strengthen the integration of young Ukrainian migrants in particular, who are not yet enrolled in a Czech-language university programme due to a lack of language skills,” the ministry said.
At the end of last year, 308,640 people were studying at universities in the Czech Republic, including 55,493 foreign nationals, 18% of the total, according to data from the Czech Statistical Office. The most foreign students came from Slovakia, followed by Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. The number of students from Ukraine has increased by more than half over the past two years, while the number of Russian students has decreased by almost a quarter. Ukrainians outnumbered Russians last year, for the first time in the last 20 years, with 6,780 students.
