Education For All and consultations with teacher unions - report on the questionnaire on participation of teacher unions in the EFA process

In order to find out whether governments have been working according to the agreements made in the Dakar framework, EI developed a questionnaire for teacher's unions to discover whether they had been involved in planning and national EFA forums.

The questionnaire contained three questions:

• whether teacher unions were aware of the existence of EFA forums in their countries and if their answers were yes, to which extent they had participated in the National EFA Forums
• whether teacher unions were aware of the existence of National EFA Plans or the active work to establish such a plan. If their answers were yes, in what ways had they participated in consultations on the National EFA Plan
• whether the teacher unions had taken any initiative related to EFA.

Conclusions drawn from the questionnaire are:

• more unions have participated in some types of consultations on EFA than those who have participated in EFA Forums. This may indicate that governments are happier to organise ad hoc consultations instead of establishing permanent forums for on-going discussion and consultations
• several unions know about the existence of National EFA Plans, but have not been consulted
• some unions report that they have been involved in policy discussions in the EFA Forums, while others seem to have been looking mainly at how to implement EFA
• among those unions which have taken part in consultations several are critical about the way in which these consultations have been organised
• many unions have tried to get meetings with the governments to discuss the EFA process without success
• most of the unions which responded to the questionnaire have organised activities related to EFA
• many governments have not bothered to organise any type of consultations with teacher unions, neither in a forum nor in any other type of meeting
• several countries did not seem to have even presented a first draft of a National EFA Plan in May 2002 despite having committed themselves to present plans " by 2002 at the latest”

[Adapted from author]