The Soviet system of extracurricular education had no analogues in terms of a set of basic characteristics that provide wide access and quality of services. Many foreign practitioners and researchers considered it as a model of effective activity aimed at the development of personal, social and professional skills.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the newly independent countries embarked on the path of simultaneous integration into the global educational agenda and identification of the national educational strategy in the new institutional environment. In addition, a number of countries have faced serious socio-economic challenges that are significant for education on one scale or another.

The relevance of the study is due to the growing recognition of the importance of extracurricular education in addressing issues of educational and gender equality, the prevention of antisocial behaviour and the formation of 21st-century skills, identity, and civic consciousness (Larson, 2000; Mahoney, Larson, and Eccles, 2005). Post-Soviet transit has made a significant contribution to the accessibility, involvement of various participants in the educational process, as well as to the reproduction of social inequality.

Extracurricular education of children and adolescents has recently become increasingly the object of close attention, both from society and from the state (Buylova & Klenova, 2016). To a certain extent, this is due to the high potential for the development of an individualized approach to each student, the state also sees a greater educational role and special resources for preparing children for life and work in a rapidly changing world and for the formation of human capital (Volosovets, 2016).

In recent decades, the extracurricular education sector has received new impulses for development and study. Numerous empirical studies reveal the significant role of such classes in improving academic performance (Holland & Andre, 1987), solving social problems (Eccles & Barber, 1999), and developing social skills (Feldman & Matjasko, 2005). Finally, this type of activity allows us to overcome barriers related to the socio-economic status of participants, increase the level of accessibility of educational services, promote gender equality, and help children from disadvantaged families (Covay & Carbonaro, 2010).

Despite the existence of separate works on the development of extracurricular education in Russia (Kosaretsky, Kupriyanov, & Filippova, 2016; Kosaretsky et al., 2019) and the countries of the former USSR (Bjornavold, 2000; Dubovick, 2005), the post-Soviet space remains virtually unexplored in terms of the inventory of extracurricular education systems.

The study examined the availability of extracurricular education in 10 countries of the former Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Tajikistan and Ukraine. The data were collected between September 2020 and September 2021 in semi-structured interviews with experts in the field of extracurricular education, including heads of organizations, as well as in the analysis of national statistics.

Preliminary results reveal the following trends: the transformation of the Institute of adult education (in the Soviet period) in the institutionalized sector, fail, from integrated coverage of reducing the overall coverage, the rejection of "rule of education" (reduce the "weight" of tasks indoctrination), low and average availability, including territorial and gender, the preservation of traditional shares the content of lessons, infrastructure transformation: the emergence of a "backup" (the growth of classes in the school). The transformation of the system of extracurricular education in the countries of the former Soviet Union has led to a gap in accessibility and in a number of countries has exposed the problem of social inequality, in particular, territorial inequality. Despite the continued high proportion of free classes, the shrinking network of organizations and the "urbanization" of offerings have also contributed to the growing inequality of access and, in general, the decline in overall coverage.

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