Former Russian education official and British Council executive Elena Lenskaya has taken on a new role as head of development at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences, a move that comes at a time of growing political strains between Russia and Britain.

Lenskaya, once an international department head at the Education Ministry, has for the past 10 years been an assistant director at the British Council’s Moscow office.

The Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences or MSSES is considered one of the country’s top graduate schools. Its president and founder, Teodor Shanin, was born in Vilnius and had taught sociology at Manchester University in England so the institution offers British and Russian qualifications and has gained a reputation for producing scores of leading specialists in education, law, sociology and related fields.

Many of its graduates occupy senior positions in Russian federal and regional authorities. Since opening its doors in 1995, it has become internationally recognised for its contribution to educational reform.

Lenskaya began her research career in 1974 at the Russian Academy of Education, following a brief period as a school teacher. She has now been given a host of tasks: developing new graduate training programmes, liaising and advising the federal Education Ministry on policy issues, delivering workshops and seminars at the school’s education policy centre, and generating the grants and income necessary to fund the job.

It is a tough brief and one that would intimidate many approaching it on a full-time basis. Lenskaya, who is in her late 50s, has made it a part-time job so as to make time for other equally challenging work in the educational sphere.

A convivial woman whose wit and characteristic good humour go hand in hand with a sharp intellect and enviable command for detail, it would be difficult to find another person with her breadth of experience in Russian education. She is a graduate of the Moscow Linguistic University and speaks fluent English with only the slightest trace of an accent, evident in an intonation that verges on musical.

Research into early childhood learning and experience in writing text books led to her involvement in the Academy of Education’s reform team during the heady days of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. After spending seven years as head of the international department of the Education Ministry she moved to the British Council to head its education projects, eventually rising to assistant director.

For some months now, she had been looking to move on. Then the diplomatic strain between Britain and Russia spilled over into a spat that saw the British Council’s activities in St Petersburg and Ekaterinburg suspended.

“I decided to leave long before the council’s current predicament, when I learned of a restructuring plan that to my mind made no sense at all,” she says, as we sit cramped together in the tiny cubby-hole of an office she has at the MSSES, located in the Academy of National Economy in south-west Moscow.

The restructuring plan involved reducing a long-standing reliance on in-house expertise and creating more generalised programmes and management, Lenskaya says. As a woman who has spent her career developing expertise in educational training, management, quality assurance and delivery, she saw the writing on the wall.

She left, taking one member of her British Council team with her, and is now busy setting up a wide range of new projects designed to improve Russia’s capacity to deliver high quality, modern and appropriate school, university and education training.

A key challenge is to establish a new masters degree in quality assurance and testing to help education authority officers, university managers and other mid-career professionals design tests, interpret results and understand comparative data from international partners.

Many of Russia’s recent education reforms have failed to be fully implemented because, at a certain point, the mismatch between the Soviet-era psychology and training of many managers and new methodologies or practices have reached a breaking point, Lenskaya maintains.

One area where this is more evident than most is in the corruption that still dogs Russian education: “The Ministry of Education has asked MSSES to look at the bottlenecks that are evident in the delivery of big national projects – a very political issue,” she says with understated irony.

A cursory glance reveals the divergence between the conception for the delivery of one multi-million dollar project involving a couple of dozen regions that was supposed to depend on the recommendations of an expert commission, and the results, with some regions chosen where there was little or no evidence of educational management talent or innovation. It all suggests the size of the task she faces.

Designing transparent project delivery structures and detailing precise operating rules takes on a new significance in such an environment.


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