ANNUAL REPORTOF UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT COMMISSIONER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS 74 Institutional care and education Visits to 35 institutions of care and education of children and 20 service units for children of local executive bodies and local self-government bodies proved that the service units do not adequately control the conditions of care and education of children. The monitors recorded violations of children’s rights to information, privacy, appeal, and consideration of the child’s opinion. Isolated cases of placement of children in psychiatric institutions without compliance with any legally established procedure; transfer of children from institution to institution; stay of children in the orphanage after reaching 18 were documented. Exceeding the period of stay of children in the centres of social and psychological rehabilitation of children remains an issue. In addition, in special boarding schools, training and rehabilitation centres of the Ministry of Education and Science that at the beginning of the 2019/2020 school year had more than 31,700 children enrolled, poor quality of training and lack of equipment for medical and rehabilitation services were observed. CHAPTER 3 Violations of the procedure for placing children in such institutions have also been established. Example At Terpinnia special boarding school of Zaporizhia Oblast Council, parents first had to apply for enrollment of their children in the institution and only after that the conclusion of the inclusive resource centre on the need to place a child in a special boarding school was provided. In addition, 13 children of the first grade turned out to be residents of the village of Terpinnia. In order to clarify this situation, in December 2019, the Commissioner sent the request to the leadership of the Ministry of Social Policy, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Education and Science to check the legality of the grounds for enrollment of school students in this education institution. The issue is on the watch list of the Commissioner. It should be noted that, according to the statistics of the Ministry of Education and Science, at the beginning of the 2019/2020 school year there were more than 62,400 children in boarding schools and orphanages of the Ministry of Education and Science, of which only 3,000 were orphaned children and children deprived of parental care. Other children have parents. In addition, monitoring revealed a trend to reduce the referral of children to public institutions of institutional care and education. For example, the Service Unit for Children of Zaporizhia City Council, has sharply decreased the number of requests for recreation vouchers for children in the city of Zaporizhia over the past 3 years: from 41 in 2017 to 29 in 2018, and 10 in 2019. Instead, the number of children placed in the private Orthodox Charitable Orphanage “Nadiya” of Zaporizhia Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church grows every year: in 2017 – 6 children, in 2018 – 30 children, in 2019 – 26 children. These examples are evidence of the fact that children are artificially enrolled in the boarding schools. It is against the objectives of the reform of institutional care of children launched in 2017 that aimed to provide care and upbringing of a child in the family or close-to-family environment.