Svitlana Merkulova, an English teacher at Irpin Lyceum No. 2, is among the ten finalists of the national Global Teacher Prize Ukraine 2026 award.

Yuliia Osinska, deputy mayor of Irpin, announced the news.

"I am lucky to know Ms Svitlana personally. She has been teaching English in my son’s class for several years now," Osinska wrote.

According to her, Merkulova’s lessons are creative and innovative, and the children show strong results in English.

The ten finalists were named on 1 September during the "Yedyni Novyny" telethon. In early August Merkulova had made the list of fifty semi-finalists.

Irpin is the only community of the Kyiv region represented in the final. The other nine teachers work in Lviv, Poltava, Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Boryslav, Smila, Peremyshel and Prychornomorske.

In September the finalists head to an assessment centre, where an expert jury will evaluate their skills over two days. An independent consultant audits the transparency of the selection.

Public voting is running in parallel on the Diia.Osvita platform and stays open until 30 September. The teacher with the most votes receives a separate award, the "Choice of Ukrainians".

The main prize is one million hryvnias. For the first time the award will also be given in the "Teacher-Defender" category, to an educator who joined the army.

The winner of the tenth, anniversary season will be announced on 3 October, World Teachers’ Day. The prize was founded by the Osvitoria public union.

As a reminder, more than eleven thousand pupils started the new school year in the Irpin community.