School Survey Including the "Other" Third Gender was Stopped in Bulgaria, Education Minister Announced

In the Bulgarian schools, the questionnaire on the SELFIE tool was suspended. That was announced by Minister Krasimir Valchev. It was prepared by the EC, and it was distributed to about 900 schools in Bulgaria to assess their opportunities for introducing digital technologies for teaching and learning. The questionnaire scandal comes when it is clear that the students have to mark their sex and the options are 4 - "boy", "girl", "other" and "I prefer not to say".

I have a preliminary letter from EU Commissioner for Education, Tibor Navracić, in which he assures me that they will find a technical solution for the SELFIE digital self-assessment questionnaire, but we still have no proposal for a concrete solution, the Minister of Education and Science told journalists.

On February 22, the Ministry of Education and Science announced that they had sent a letter to the EC Director-General for Education, Youth, Culture and Sports, Tesis Christophydo, requesting the editing of the SELFIE digital self-assessment questionnaire. The request is to remove the option "other" from the question of determining the gender of the participants, or the whole issue should be removed, because in the current version it is unacceptable. The letter from the Ministry of Education and Science stated that the SELFIE tool helps schools to implement digital technologies in the teaching, learning and evaluation processes and therefore the case needs to be resolved as soon as possible.

"I suppose the technical solution will be one of the two that we have proposed - or the answer to the question that has triggered a discussion or the question itself - is unnecessary for the purposes of the questionnaire - to assess the digital preparedness of the schools as it is one of the...