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Global State of Debate survey

The International Debate Education Association (IDEA) is a global network supporting debate and critical thinking education, working with schools, universities, NGOs, and independent debate organisations worldwide.

This survey maps the state of debate education globally to help us advocate for stronger support and recognition of debate as an educational method. It targets debate organisations of any kind: NGOs, schools, charities, companies, or informal groups, including those for whom debate is only a minor part of their work.

Note: IDEA member organisation do not need to fill out this form, because all of these questions already appear in our annual member survey.

The questions we will ask

1) Organisation type and administration
2) Financial stability and funding (estimates only — every question here is optional)
3) Your position in society and partnerships
4) General attitudes toward critical thinking and debate as a method

Results will be used to: 1) publish academic research on debate education, and 2) produce a Global State of Debate (GSD) report for practitioners and policymakers.

The survey has 5 sections and takes 30–45 minutes. Progress saves locally in your browser, so you can return later.

Section 1 – General information: Foundational details about how your organisation works. Section 2 – Finances: Rough estimates on funding sources, sustainability, and what would help make funding more sustainable. All questions optional. Section 3 – Programmes & expertise: What debate activities you run and who implements them. Section 4 – Recognition: How debate is recognised as a pedagogical method in your context. Section 5 – Civic engagement: How your activities connect to participatory processes.

Privacy Policy

This survey is hosted on Tally, a GDPR-compliant platform that does not track your IP address or geographic metadata. To protect the safety and privacy of all participating organizations, particularly those operating in sensitive or restrictive environments, this study utilizes a private-by-design framework. Several points:

1) Please do not include individual names or identifiable private details about your staff, educators, or participants. While we will manually inspect all the data we receive, we ask that you avoid divulging any personal information in open-text fields.

2) We guarantee anonymity for your organisation. Your organisation's name will remain confidential by default and will not be linked to your answers in public reporting unless you explicitly grant us permission to do so.

3) We will employ geographic masking. To protect organisations in sensitive environments, we will anonymise or group geographic data into broader regional brackets where publishing specific country-level data could risk identifying an isolated organisation.

4) Raw data will be only accessed by designated members of IDEA research team.

5) If we believe your organisation should be highlighted and named in our final report, we will contact you to explicitly ask for your permission to mention your organisation by name, giving you the chance to review the information mentioned.

Contact details

The person completing this survey. You'll only be contacted if we need a clarification.

Name and surname

Email address

We collect names purely to verify unique responses and clean our dataset. How should we handle your organization’s real name in our public reports, papers, and acknowledgments?

Publicly Visible. We are happy for our organization to be named, thanked in the acknowledgments, or highlighted as a case study. (The IDEA team will still contact us to review any specific case study before publication).

Strictly Confidential / Pseudonymized. Do not publish our real name under any circumstances. In public reports, replace our name with a generic description (e.g., "A university debate club in Germany" or "An educational NGO from Southern Africa").

How would you like us to handle your country data in our public maps and reports?

Always Visible. We are completely fine with our country being named and displayed on maps, even if we are the only organization responding from our country.

Visible Only if Anonymized by a Crowd. You may display our country, but only if multiple other organizations from our country also respond. If we are the only one, please group us into a broader regional bracket (e.g., "Western Europe" or "Southeast Asia") so we blend in.

Strictly Masked. Please do not list our specific country under any circumstances. Always group our data into a broader regional bracket to guarantee our anonymity.