Twenty teachers from ten schools in the Ungheni and Călărași districts spent two days, on 15 and 16 June, not at the front of the class but at the desk. They learned how to bring the school closer to the family and how to work with children who have special educational needs — from involving parents and communicating effectively to managing conflicts and offering emotional support. The workshop, run by CCF Moldova, is a “training of trainers”: those trained now will pass the knowledge on to colleagues, so that, in the end, more than 120 teachers and managers are prepared.
Every child needs a team that believes in them. When school and family become partners, children feel safer, more confident, and have a better chance of succeeding.
Lorina Ghițu, CCF Moldova
From the boarding school to the classroom next door
To understand why such a workshop matters, you have to look at where we came from. Two decades ago, children with disabilities or from vulnerable families usually ended up in boarding schools. The deinstitutionalisation reform closed this network year by year: the number of children in special schools fell nationally from about 1,800 in 2013 to roughly 500 today. The trace is visible in the Ungheni municipality itself, where the building of the former boarding school now houses an Education Centre.
The boarding school’s place was taken, in theory, by the mainstream school. “In theory”, because moving a child into an ordinary class without preparing the teacher, the parents and the classmates means inclusion only on paper. It is precisely this gap that workshops like the one in mid-June target.
How many children, and how ready is the school
The number of children for whom inclusion is not an abstraction is rising visibly. In the 2025/26 school year, there were about 14,000 pupils with special educational needs and disabilities in the Republic of Moldova — up from 11,800 a year earlier, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Of them, 95.8% study in mainstream schools, alongside the other children, and only 4.2% in special schools. The rising number does not mean “more sick children”, but, more likely, better identification of those who need support.
Attitudes are changing too: parental support for inclusive education rose in five years from 23% to 40%, and teachers’ support from 41% to 60%.
Ungheni, a pilot region
The district is not a spectator in this reform, but one of its laboratories. Ungheni was chosen, alongside Cahul, as one of the country’s two “key regions” for inclusive education. In the two districts, over 1,200 staff in early and primary education were trained, and 30 institutions received 462 sets of support equipment worth almost 138,000 dollars, with EU support. The CCF workshop therefore lands on ground already worked: after the equipment came, the people trained to use it come.
For context, the district’s school system has 11,061 pupils and 876 teachers this year. How many of these children have special needs is not published separately by district — a figure the local education directorates know best.
The workshop’s details come from CCF Moldova’s communication; the programme framework (partners, funding) is confirmed by UNICEF Moldova statements. The national figures belong to the National Bureau of Statistics and UNICEF; the key-region data are shared between the Cahul and Ungheni districts. The number of children with special educational needs in the Ungheni district is not published separately by the Bureau. The subject concerns vulnerable children — all data are aggregated, with no child identified.