GALE develops individual right to education survey
22 December 2020 - In addition to the Right to Education Checklist, GALE is now also developing a survey that can be filled in by individuals. The Right to Education Checklist is a policy checklist with 15 checkpoints. It monitors the level of implementation of the right to education for LGBTIQ+ students. However, the Checklist requires some knowledge about your country’s education policy. Many LGBTIQ+ people would like to contribute to the mapping, but don’t know about policy. They asked if GALE could develop a questionnaire that links their individual experiences with school with the national policy.
The GALE Checklist
The GALE Checklist is based on human rights standards of what internationally is understood as good quality of education. The checklist consists of 15 questions which cover the 3 key areas of the right to education: the right to access school (including feeling well in school), the right to a relevant curriculum and the right to have good and supportive teachers. Each checkpoint can be rated on a five point scale ranging from completely denying policy, via ambiguous policy to supportive policy.
The GALE Survey
Translating the Checklist into a survey that is based on individual experiences is complicated. In the first place, we want to use validated questions. This way we can compare the data from this survey to data from other large scale surveys that are already done among the general population.
Another challenge is to make to results of the survey comparable to the policy checklist. For example, if we ask how often LGBTIQ+ students were bullied, the result can not be automatically be translated to a classification in denying, ambiguous or supportive policy. Although most denying countries generally have higher rates of bullying, we cannot say that countries with a higher level then 25% bullying have a denying policy.
Testing
Some years ago GALE developed a survey which was internationally tested, but the first version could not be translated to the checklist. Now GALE is pretesting a second version to see if the questions are understandable and if the survey is not too long. The survey has 89 questions, of which 26 are mandatory because they determine the score on the checklist. The other questions are supporting the analysis and make the survey comparable to other surveys.
GALE members who are interested to test the survey, can do it here. The test phase will end on 10 January 2021.
GALE members and other activists who would like to cooperate on translating and implementing the survey in their country, can contact GALE to discuss the strategy.