On June 17, the management team of the «Mihai Eminescu» Theoretical High School in the municipality of Ungheni announced that it had taken part in the closing conference of the national «Investim în directori. Leadership și transformare organizațională» program. It is, formally, a wrap-up piece of news — a district high school that made it among the few schools in the country selected for a leadership training program. The useful question for Ungheni residents, however, is not who received congratulations, but what such a program concretely changes for the schools of a district that is short of teachers.
What the program is
«Investim în directori» is run by the Ministry of Education and Research together with the National Institute for Education and Leadership (INEL). The program ran from June 2025 to May 2026 and targeted the management teams of schools — principals and deputy principals. Initially announced with 12 management teams selected, the program appears with 13 institutions involved in the ministry’s 2026 action plan, which sets as a target the training of 26 managers and 39 teaching staff, through dozens of mentoring sessions, study visits (including to Romania) and a closing conference.
The project team of the Ungheni high school was guided, according to the announcement, by national mentors. The fact that a single institution from the district figures among the roughly thirteen across the whole country is, in itself, a benchmark.
Who INEL is
The National Institute for Education and Leadership is a young institution — it was launched in February 2024, with the support of the European Union, the UNDP and UNICEF. Its stated mission is to raise the quality of leadership in education and to build a network of mentors. At its launch, the ministry announced the intention for this network to reach, in time, every school in the Republic of Moldova. «Investim în directori» is one of the tools through which the institute pursues this goal.
The local context — fewer and fewer people at the blackboard
For Ungheni’s schools, though, what is at stake is first of all people. In the 2025–2026 school year, primary and general secondary education in the district had 11,061 pupils and 876 teaching staff, according to the National Bureau of Statistics — almost a fifth fewer staff than a decade ago. Against this backdrop, the quality of each school’s leadership weighs disproportionately much — a well-trained principal can keep a small school afloat, a weak one pushes it toward merging.
The thing is, training leadership and filling positions are two different things. For the 2026–2027 school year, Ungheni district enters the placement competition with 73 unfilled positions, the fifth-largest shortfall in the country. Three of these positions are precisely at the «Mihai Eminescu» high school. In other words, the very school that trained its leadership team goes into the autumn with three classes without their teacher.
What the wrap-up does not show
The program’s official communications describe above all a process — «collaboration», «reflection», «organizational transformation» — and less so measurable results for pupils. The named list of the roughly 13 participating institutions has not been made public, and for «Investim în directori» there is no public budget figure or a separately announced donor, even though INEL, overall, operates with external support. These are the gaps that a program wrap-up should cover.
The participation of the Ungheni team is real and it is no small thing. But for a district short of 73 teachers, the test of any «leadership» program remains a simple one — whether it helps schools keep their people at the blackboard and their pupils in class.