“What on earth is crowdresearch?” we hear you say. You’ve heard of crowdfunding, right? Lots of people contributing small amounts to meet a bigger goal. Crowdresearch follows the same principle – but with research instead of money!
“Okay, but how does it work?”
Simple really:
1. You get in touch to tell us you want to be involved.
2. We assign you a school and send you some super clear instructions (available in both written and video format) that show you exactly what to do.
3. You follow the instructions and gather the information we need about the school you’ve been assigned.
4. You enter what you’ve found into our simple Google Form and hit ‘Submit’.
5. That’s it! You’re done! (Unless you want to do another school…)
“Sounds simple enough. What kind of thing will I be asked to look for?”
The first phase of this project is looking at whole texts studied in the KS3 curriculum in schools in England. You’ll be asked to go to the school website and find their curriculum details, and — if the information is available — to tell us the names of the novels and plays that students in years 7, 8 and 9, plus any other information you think might be relevant.
“…what if the information isn’t available?”
Then you tell us that too! It’s useful for us to know when schools haven’t made their curriculum information easily available so that our campaign team can follow up with them directly. It’s good practice for schools to make this sort of thing accessible, so that prospective students and their families can see clearly what they’re going to be studying but many schools still don’t do this. Hopefully this process might nudge schools to make this information nice and clear for people to see, as well as getting them to check the gender balance of their curriculum!
“I’m pretty busy, how much time will it take?”
As much as you want to give! Depending on how much and how easily available information is, researching one school should take around 15-30 minutes. You can volunteer to just do one school, or two, or a dozen or a whole local authority area if you feel like it! (And if you get the research bug you can just keep going and going and going and…you get the idea.)
“Sounds awesome! How do I join in?”
Just fill out the form on this page (or pop us an email at endsexisminschools@gmail.com) and we’ll get the ball rolling! We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
Got more questions? Check out our FAQ page or feel free to email us at the above address with any queries you might have and our friendly team will be happy to help.
